A Load of Bull

Cattle mutilation stories are all weird and all sound kind of similar, don't they? There's the dead animal missing various body parts with no blood or tracks or footprints or evidence of any kind. The TV news crews come by and get a soundbite from a bewildered farmer or rancher, somebody suckles about UFOs, and then we all forget about it till the next time.

And it's been going on like this for more than half a century, without a single arrest, not a single clue, no answers of any kind. Don't you find that strange? Something is happening to these animals, something we clearly can't explain. 50 plus years? 10,000 plus cattle? That's no load of bull. So what is it? They got a small beam of light.

Oh, oh, oh, oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! It's some true weird stuff! TV news watchers in the area around Waco Texas, who happened to flip on Fox 44 on April 24th of this year, became the latest audience for a gruesome mystery that has confounded and baffled generations. The deaths and mutilation of cattle along Texas old San Antonio road in Madison County are under investigation.

According to the Madison County Sheriff's Office, ranchers said that a 6-year-old longhorn cross cow was found dead at their ranch, mutilated and lying on its side. A straight, clean cut with apparent precision was made to remove the hide around the cow's mouth on one side, leaving the meat under the removed hide untouched.

The tongue was also completely removed from the body with no blood spill. The Sheriff's Office says there were no signs of struggle and the grass around the cow was undisturbed. No footprints or tire tracks were noted in the area. The whole story goes like this. Law enforcement reports finding six dead cattle along the Texas State Highway.

The carcasses spread out over three counties. All six animals had their tongues neatly and precisely removed. The hide around one side of the mouths completely gone. No signs of blood on the animals or on the ground. Two of the six cattle also had their genitalia and anuses removed. The Madison County Texas Sheriff's Office noted that this appeared to have been accomplished using the same sort of precision circular cut as the injury to the animals' faces.

The soil around the bodies was undisturbed. No footprints, no tire tracks. There were no signs of predation or scavengers. In fact, according to ranchers who'd alerted law enforcement after finding the dead cattle, the bodies seem to have been left completely untouched by any scavenging activity. Even that of carry-on birds.

Super weird, right? Yeah, super weird. And definitely news, just not new news. There's this story from January 2011. Fox 4 News at 5. And first on Fox here at 5.30, a bizarre animal mutilation case near Kansas City International. A rancher found one of his cattle dead, reproductive organs removed, and no signs pointing to a suspect.

Fox 4's Mitch Weber here now. And Mitch, this case is stumping the cops and a veterinarian. Yeah, John, the vet doesn't know how the butcher bovine died. It had been sick for days, but was expected to recover. We want to warn you, even though we've blurred out the pictures, some viewers might find the images disturbing.

We're lucky here to be able to run cattle as close to Kansas City limits and in the city limits for that matter. A prime spot for the three ranchers who leased land from the Kansas City International Airport. Casey Hamilton's cattle serve an important purpose. They graze the pastures to keep the grass down, which in turn keeps deer away from the runways.

Thursday morning, Casey came out to feed his herd and found this. His six-year-old cow mutilated, its utter and reproductive organ removed. I couldn't believe that it happened so close to home. Friend and one of the other ranchers, Gordon Phillip, arrived with the Kansas City, Missouri police and a vet out of Smithville.

It's amazing how, I mean, like a vet said, if he had done a massive mastectomy like that on a cow, there'd be blood all over the field, but there was no blood. When the farmer arrived here Thursday morning, the gate was still locked and there were no footprints or tire tracks leading to the dead cow. It's somewhat amazing because of the lack of evidence.

Thirty years ago, Gordon found one of his cattle mutilated. His vet at the time looked toward the sky for an explanation. He was just in amazement when I showed him this cow 30 years ago. He went round and round looking for where a space machine had landed to see if he could find any burn marks in the pasture. The lack of evidence is leading to a cow conundrum for investigators and ranchers.

Just amazing how whoever does that kind of terrible things to animals seem to know what they're doing. And this incident, which took place in Oklahoma in 2019. Better hide your a**. Don't let me know who did it. Betty Bessire has lived east of Fletcher for over 40 years and says she's never seen anything this gruesome.

If somebody had to have tranquilized her and then give her a shot of that stuff that colligates your blood, because there was no bullet holes, no nothing. Comanche County Sheriff Kenny Stradley says they've investigated similar cases but none of this magnitude in several years. Bessire says she has an idea of what would lead someone to do this.

They was getting ready to make a sacrifice, I think, to the devil over that red moon. Anytime you get a bad change in the moon like that, you'll see this stuff come up. Or how about this one in Missouri, 2014. Yeah, three different cows on three different days found mutilated. Their owner is out of rational explanations and that has her looking to the sky.

I'm normally a very private person, but I'm willing to do this because it's just something I want some answers to. Henry County Rancher Lyn Mitchell is perplexed. She found one of her 1,500 pound cows dead in the pasture on July 19th. Its tongue sliced out, its heart exposed. It wasn't detached, it was just hanging out there.

Something similar happened just three weeks earlier. I looked at first to see her tongue was gone, then immediately noticed the udder had completely been removed. Lynn says this cow's reproductive organs were gone too, making the death more mysterious. This char mark, still visible today, surrounded the cow. Lynn couldn't believe it was happening again.

She found the first cow more than a year earlier, December of 2011. She had obviously been cut on the side of her jaw. Her tongue was gone, her ear was gone. In all three deaths, Lynn says the cuts were clean like they were done during a surgery and there was no blood despite the animal's gaping wounds. And since the cows graze in such an isolated place, nobody saw or heard a thing.

The Sheriff's Department and a veterinarian have investigated, but just like Lynn, they can't find an answer. The more it happens, the more questions you get and the more you try to research and learn, you find more and more things that make you ask more questions. With all the reasonable causes debunked, Lynn says she's open to the possibility that extraterrestrial life could be responsible.

Similar cases of animal mutilation have been reported in Missouri in the past few years. The FBI nearly investigated in the 1970s. With the unsolved mysteries looming, aliens have become a common answer. Lynn's not sure what's right, she just wants it to stop. Something happened to these cows and it's not something that you see every day, it's not in your normal, so something else is going on.

Documented stories of the mutilation of cattle and other livestock date back to the 1700s. You can find piles of stories of such things happening in Ireland alone, though these mutilations seem very much like the work of your everyday garden variety humans. Animals found with broken limbs, slashed throats, crudely amputated ears.

This is horrific to hear about, I know. But I'm telling you these gruesome things so that we're all on the same page. Cattle mutilation isn't new. When it comes to land and livestock, power, privilege and politics are as much a part of the picture as pastures and lassos and water troughs. Whether it's the mid-1800s in Ireland, when the Irish people pushed back against the rule of the British Crown, or the American West in the 1970s when conflict between ranchers and the Bureau of Land Management flared up yet again, livestock have long been pawns in the ancient battle for control of the land and its resources.

Here's the deal with the recent mutilations in Texas. It doesn't appear to be the work of humans. For starters, the six dead cattle each came from a different herd. Each body was located in a different pasture, and again, spread out across three counties, with zero evidence showing how these animals were transported. There's also zero evidence of human activity near any of the bodies, and no explanation whatsoever for the apparently bloodless, precision surgery performed on the creatures.

Then there's the weird question of why these animals showed no signs of any scavenging activity. Nature is incredibly efficient when it comes to disposing of the dead. There's a reason why our woodlands and wild areas aren't choked with the decomposing remains of dead animals. Bacteria, insects, birds, other omnivorous animals can all make pretty quick work of a body, even a big one, like a deer or an elk.

Even a diseased animal can be a feast. Did you know that vultures have this wild set of genes that let them eat the kind of putrid grossness that could kill another scavenger? Vultures can eat rotting flesh laced with anthrax bacteria, or an animal that's succumbed to rabies. Vultures are like those extreme eaters on YouTube.

They can swallow just about anything, except for these six mutilated cattle that were found along the Texas State Highway. Even vultures passed on that meal. Yeah, it's pretty weird. But this is 2023, and we know some stuff about pathogens and technology and whatnot. So let's come up with a theory that makes sense. You can say, well, maybe those cattle had a new version of, like, mad cow disease or something, and even the vultures were like, ew, pass.

That's one theory that's been floated to explain the Texas Six. And you can say, well, I bet you can buy laser surgery tools on Amazon, so it was probably some teenagers getting up to mischief with those cows. Okay, yeah, I guess you can say that. Although the way some of y'all carry on about how lazy and helpless today's screen-addicted teens are, frankly, surprise you're willing to give them credit for pulling off this pretty impressive combo play of stealth cattle rustling and state-of-the-art vet surgery.

You can say, well, I bet it's the government and those darn black helicopters. Sure, yeah, okay, you can say that. Spoiler alert, helicopters are a big part of this story. But when you're finished saying all of it, sit with it for a minute and then ask yourself, does any of that make any sense? Really? Does it hold together in any rational way?

Let's jump into the true weird time machine. We're not going to go back far just to the 1970s. Get ready to be dazzled, though, because we're going to land on open range in the American West. I promise you have never seen so much sky or breathed air so clean and sharp in your whole life. But hey, why exactly are we heading to the 1970s?

Because that decade saw more than 10,000 reports of mutilated cattle. And when you consider that it's believed that as few as one in 10 mutilation incidents were actually reported at all, you begin to grasp the enormity of this phenomenon. Ranchers have been grazing their cattle on open range public lands for well over 100 years, going all the way back to the days of the Homestead Act, settling the frontier and how the West was won and all that.

It was a kind of a cattle buffet free-for-all. And not surprisingly, some of the land was badly overgrazed and poorly managed, not from any malice or bad intention. People just didn't know any better. I mean, my God, some of these folks walked across the United States behind a covered wagon. They built what homes they could cobble together, grew what crops they could coax from the soil and struggled to keep their livestock fed, watered and safe from predators and thieves.

It's a bit much to expect them to have also been experts in land management and watersheds, crying out loud. But as time passed and the numbers of people and livestock grew, it became clear to ranchers that something needed to be done to ensure fair access to the land and adequate feed for their cattle. In 1934, Congress passed the Taylor Grazing Act, which created specific grazing districts on public lands.

And it worked really well at first. Both land and livestock were better for being managed. Both were healthier. And it seemed like a solid resolution to the very real challenges faced on both sides. But by the late 1960s, Americans had different expectations for their public lands. There was a new focus on protecting the environment and preserving it for future generations.

New laws were passed, like the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 and the Endangered Species Act of 1973 and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976. These were laws meant to nurture both the rangeland and the species that called it home. The problem was, in order to accomplish that, the Bureau of Land Management stepped hard on the dusty cowboy boots of ranchers who were not accustomed to having their grazing leases and permits modified or messed with.

It wasn't exactly war between the ranchers and the BLM, but the relationship became more tense and hostile. And then, from the 1970s onward, it only got worse. Coincidentally or not, my fellow weirdos, the 1970s were, as you now know, a peak decade for mysterious cattle mutilation incidents in the American West. And also, coincidentally, I just happened to be living in a valley full of cattle ranchers in northwestern Wyoming at the time.

I was a little kid and we were pretty isolated. No phone in our house, no radio, and just one small black and white TV that picked up a single channel out of Pocatello, Idaho. Yet I somehow knew about the cattle mutilations that were happening all over the West. Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas. The adults talked about it openly.

There were loads of newspaper stories. Like the one that ran in the Casper Star Tribune in October 1975. One rancher, who happened to be a former criminal prosecutor, told the paper that he was convinced that the animals had been mutilated in one location and their bodies placed in another. He cited the lack of blood, the lack of any evidence at the scene where the bodies were found.

Another individual, identified as a veteran lawman, expressed his belief that the cattle were killed, mutilated, roped by the neck, and transported by helicopter to the site where the remains were found. And in many cases, including one real puzzler from Colorado, the dead cattle were found unreasonably far from their regular grazing areas.

In that Colorado case, the mutilated animals were found drifting in a shallow lake. It just made no sense. And by the time the Casper Star Tribune published that story, there were more than 15 reported cattle mutilations that season in Wyoming alone. The news coverage was intense and wild. There were reports of ranchers seeing odd flashing lights in the skies above the range where the kill sites were located.

There was talk of mysterious cults, of pranksters, and of course, those roving bands of teenagers out too late and up to no good. Rewards and bounties were posted, offering cash to anyone who could help shed light on the bovine butchery. And poor Colorado had it even worse, with more than 130 mutilations reported across 20 counties.

It was so bad, the Colorado Senator Floyd Haskell pleaded with the FBI to get involved. Something to consider right here and now is this, all of these incidents occurring in multiple counties, multiple states, big ranching operations and small, thousands and thousands of dollars in reward money on offer, and not a single person arrested, charged, or convicted of the crime of mutilating an animal.

The New York Times on October 30th, 1975 blared the headline, 11 states baffled by mutilation of cattle, and then went on to say that no investigators, including some federales in Minneapolis, had been able to locate even a single clue pointing to human involvement in the killings. No clues, no evidence, nothing. Yet there was animal after animal turning up with eyes, tongues, ears, udders, anuses, sex organs, all seemingly removed, cored out even, with the kind of surgical precision that no rancher worth his or her hat could possibly blame on a coyote, not with a straight face.

As Elbert County, Colorado Sheriff George A. Yarnell put it, quote, I've been around cattle my whole life, and I can sure tell whether it's been done by a coyote or a sharp instrument. In addition to these carcasses being untouched by scavengers for the most part, there were some other weird findings. For example, 16 mutilated cattle were brought to Colorado State University for necropsy.

That's what we call an autopsy when the subject is an animal. Anyway, they found that five of the 16 had been butchered by humans, and all of those cuts were made after the animals had already died. But the other 11, they were alive when the cuts were made, and there was no sign of human activity, no evidence of poison or any chemical substance, no evidence that the animals had been captured or restrained in any way.

And the cuts to their flesh, sharp to the point of being surgical, it was a mystery. The five cows that were butchered more conventionally tell us that we do have some reason to believe that there may have been some copycat crimes going down. What's a copycat crime? That's when you have a person with strong criminal intent but absolutely no original thought or creativity.

It's this bizarre, awful phenomenon that humans are guilty of. And even though no one was ever caught in the act, much less after the fact, there are a handful of cattle mutilation cases where it's reasonable to think that some POS human is the culprit. And of course, there were cases where the mutilated animal showed clear evidence of having fallen prey to coyotes or wolves or wildcats.

Wyoming veterinarian Dr. Jack Konitz was called in to help investigate a reported mutilation of two cattle discovered near Driggs, Idaho. The animals were found not long after the mutilated body of another cow had turned up in the region. Dr. Konitz discovered teeth marks consistent with a dog or a coyote on the two cattle, but the vet was forced to admit that he could not explain the injuries or the circumstances that had taken the life of the first cow.

So yes, you can resolve a handful of these cases. But only a handful. So what about the rest? The feds investigated the possibility of cult behavior, you know, ritualistic sacrifice and all that. Finding nothing to support the idea that devil worshippers and the like were out there on public lands illegally harvesting cow parts, U.S. attorney Robert G. Renner was forced to acknowledge that neither the, quote, nuts nor the occult could be found responsible for the bewildering mutilations.

Then there were the helicopters. The idea that unmarked helicopters, piloted by unknown individuals, were somehow involved in these mystery mutilations, that swept the nation. Today we call it going viral. In August 1975, Morgan County, Colorado Sheriff's Deputy Denny Edmondson said that his office was getting at least half a dozen reports of helicopter sightings a night.

Then he acknowledged that despite following up on every one of those reports, his team had yet to spot a single chopper. Logan County, Colorado Sheriff H.L. Graves went a step further and said he didn't know of a single law enforcement officer able to confirm even a single helicopter sighting. Not that the facts were able to get in the way of what was proven to be a very good story.

There was such a frenzy of fear and paranoia about helicopter activity near the kill sites that the Bureau of Land Management had to paint the choppers they used for surveying grazing lands red, white and blue and they launched a big publicity campaign in the areas where surveying was taking place. They were basically pleading with the locals not to shoot them out of the sky.

And all the while, law enforcement officers like Sheriff Graves, who famously said that there were no documented helicopter sightings, they were investigating scene after inexplicable scene. Sheriff Graves told the Colorado Springs Gazette in August 1975 that he had just recently worked on the case of a Hereford cow that was found 12 miles outside Sterling, Colorado flat on its back with no blood at all remaining in the carcass and none on the scene.

Calling it a classic mutilation, Sheriff Graves said that half of the cow's udder was gone along with the anus. The animal's tongue was missing and the lower part of its jaw had been neatly stripped of its hide. One Colorado rancher bluntly disputed Graves' dismissal of helicopter involvement. His name was Dave Batterson.

He belonged to the Colorado Cattlemen's Association and he was a man with little patience for BS with a metaphorical kind, that is. Batterson said that, first of all, the helicopter thing was real. Batterson, who patrolled his herd every night, reported he saw at least one helicopter every night floodlights on and illuminating a circle about 100 feet in diameter.

And he said it was odd, though, because sometimes he could see the craft yet not be able to hear it as though the helicopter were running silent somehow. He said that one night the craft passed his house about 100 yards to the north where it was then witnessed by his neighbor who reported two bright lights underneath it.

Batterson made the very logical point that these helicopters, if that's what they were, had to be burning a lot of fuel. Fuel that someone was supplying, somewhere. He demanded to know why that angle wasn't being investigated. Solid point, Dave. And when asked who he thought might be mutilating livestock, he replied, I just know it isn't coyotes.

Batterson said, and these are really solid points, quote, coyotes do not cut a complete bag, that's an utter, off an animal and take it with them. If there's a coyote chewing on an animal, it leaves tracks all the way around. Generally, more than one coyote eats on an animal and that would mean a lot of tracks and there haven't been none.

No tracks, no blood, none of the telltale tearing or nipping marks left on the flesh that you'd expect from coyote activity. Batterson also pointed out that in order to get to the animal's tongue, the coyote or any scavenger would have to chew through the lower portion of the jaw. But if the jaw is untouched and the tongue is completely, cleanly removed, how in the world did a coyote accomplish that?

A newspaper in Ohio, the Springfield News Sun entered the chat with a very interesting point regarding the whole helicopter hypothesis. Witnesses who reported seeing helicopter activity in areas where mutilated animals were discovered also described this craft as running silent. But this was an impossibility, especially in the 1970s.

Now today, Airbus makes a fairly quiet helicopter called the H-130, but it didn't exist in the 1970s. Between the engine noise and the sounds of its rotors, helicopters are loud. It's hard to imagine how that noise could have been muffled to the degree that guys like Rancher Dave Batterson could be watching it fly right overhead, 100 yards away and still not hearing a thing.

I know what debunkers are saying, oh it's the Doppler effect, and also coyotes and people with overactive imaginations and teenagers pulling off pranks, that's what it is. Okay, but doesn't it hurt your brain just a little bit to have to do so many mental gymnastics just to get there? Report after report, state after state, never any evidence left at the scene, never any tracks or tire treads, no suspects, no arrests.

Some incidents occurred miles from the nearest road. How our cattle-cutting teenage joyriders got to and from the scene of the crime, well, no one seems to have a plausible theory. Other mutilations occurred just yards from the rancher's residence. Whether it was one cow or many, a remote field or a barnyard corral, there were no answers.

Not then, and not now. And if you're thinking, it's gotta be the aliens, congratulations, you're not alone. Back in the 1970s, people not only wondered if UFOs were somehow involved, they didn't mind going on the record to talk about it. Like Terry Mitchell, a lecturer at the University of Minnesota. He not only attributed the entire cattle mutilation phenomenon to extraterrestrial visitors, he was downright jovial about it.

Listen to this excerpt from an interview he gave to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in January 1975. The evidence gets stronger and stronger that it all has to do with UFOs. Cattle killings in the Midwest seemingly always happen in the fall. It's the same time of year every year since 1970. And it always stops around the first of the year.

When the sightings of mutilated cattle stop in the Midwest, they start up somewhere else. Mitchell went on to say that the pattern of cattle mutilations by season and region mirrored the pattern of UFO sightings. He described looping orbits around the United States in an east-west basis. He pointed to a waning of mutilations in Texas and an uptick of UFO sightings in Southern California.

Mitchell warned ranchers in California to be vigilant and pointed out that reports of strange cattle rustling there were already beginning. Mitchell offered a couple of theories as to both the how and the why of cattle mutilation. He speculated that the perpetrators had some sort of electrocution device. He called it an electromercuric gun based on the traces of mercury that had been found in both a pond in the Midwest near a kill site and in the kidneys of dead cattle that were examined at the University of Minnesota.

That's part of the how. Mitchell's take on the why has a real Star Trek vibe. He stressed that these visitors, despite having technology beyond anything possessed by humanity, haven't harmed people. He suggests that they've tried to be careful about engaging with humans. Mitchell believed that these aliens were friendly, mindful of how primitive Earth's inhabitants are, and careful not to interfere with our evolutionary journey.

You know what that sounds like? That sounds an awful lot like the Star Trek Prime Directive, doesn't it? Beverly, the Prime Directive is not just a set of rules. It is a philosophy, and a very correct one. History has proved again and again that whenever mankind interferes with a less developed civilization, no matter how well-intentioned that interference may be, the result is invariably disastrous.

Thank you, Captain Jean-Luc Picard, and thank you, Gene Roddenberry. While Mitchell believes that extraterrestrials are harvesting tissue samples from the animals for scientific study, he argues that there's just no getting around how tasty beef is. Stating that the UFOs are also collecting food for their meat-eating crews, Mitchell said, Now, back in the time machine, everybody.

Let's return to the present, where cattle mutilation isn't some dusty relic of the 1970s, but a thing that's happening right now. That has never really stopped happening. We know about as much about it today as we did then, which is to say we don't know very much at all. Historians might say that the real story of the cattle mutilation phenomenon is a reflection of ranchers' increasing distrust of government and the resulting shift of those ranchers to more extreme right-wing political positions.

Science might say that as confusing as the evidence appears, it can all be explained by predator behavior and natural environmental forces acting upon the carcasses of deceased livestock. Conspiracy theorists might say that there's a race of hyper-intelligent reptilian aliens who've been living in underground bases in the desert west for eons.

These reptilians cut a deal with then-president Dwight D. Eisenhower to be permitted to harvest a set number of livestock and people each year. This is a fun theory because many humans have vanished without a trace from America's public lands and national parks. And you know that's true. And you also might know that some of those cases reek of the unexplained, the illogical, and even the impossible.

And also, it's just a much more exciting idea that reptilian aliens like to eat us than some story about bacteria or coyotes or the shifting political alliances of cattle farmers. I mean, we can be honest and admit that, right? As someone who's followed the cattle mutilation phenomenon for most of my life, I can't help but lean away from the more conventional explanations.

There are too many questions that have never been answered to anyone's satisfaction. If it was teenage pranksters, we'd have caught at least one. Or somebody would have spilled the tea. It's too good a secret to stay a secret. And no arrests in all this time? Come on. This ain't a sitcom where every cop is a well-intentioned bumbling goof. This is reality for decades. Something's going on.

Something that refuses to hold still long enough to be resolved. It doesn't really matter what I think, although you can probably guess that I think this is part of a larger phenomenon that we simply do not understand. Yet. I'm just more curious to know what you think. How do you make sense of all this? Don't you have the feeling right there, just on the edge of conscious thought, hovering just out of reach that there is something more to all of this?

And that soon, there will be some answers? Whether we're ready or not? Yeah. Me too. Next time on True Weird Stuff. What happens when we die? Are we just walking bags of meat destined to become fertilizer? Or are we something more? Some kind of eternal energy destined to reunite with a creator? James Van Praag not only believes that we are eternal souls that live beyond physical death, he says he can communicate with those souls that have left this earthly life behind. Talking to the dead on the next True Weird Stuff.

And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, hit the plus button in the top right corner. Now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website TrueWeirdStuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content.

Everything True Weird is waiting for you at TrueWeirdStuff.com. And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram and Twitter. True Weird Stuff is a now Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweetie. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser.

Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axland. True Weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright 2023 Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.