SkyWatch: Calm Down, You Hysterical Freaks

    Ah, yes, the ever-popular "dang hysterical people seeing trouble where there ain't none" theory. This time, like most always, it's utter crap.
    Of course, I do make allowances. Not every cow was killed by ET. Satanists probably did some, but not the really, really strange ones (whoever thought a Satanist would be part of a "normal" cow mutilation?); predators probably did some, or gnawed on a couple of the carcasses after the aliens dropped 'em back down, but I tend to side with New Mexico State Police Officer Gabe Valdez on this one when he told Jim Marrs: "If it is predators, then we have predators with super powers. It is hard to believe that predators can pull a steer's heart out through a small hole in it's neck. And I have seen that."
    When the cattle first started showing up dead, of course law enforcement and state officials wanted to quell what could easily develop into a full-blown panic, so all kind of "natural" deaths were suggested, such as predators like coyotes and stuff and diseases like blackleg. What looked like they could be cuts, people said, could have been from predators or scavengers chewing on the animal; I believe one sheriff even used the word "varmints." Don't worry, farmers, the pros are all over this one.
    I'd like to point out the animal teeth typically leave ragged marks on a body, not neat, straight, occasionally cauterized lines. Disease would show up in an autopsy. And autopsies aren't always right, such as in this little anecdote from Alien Agenda. 
    Hide samples from mutilated cattle were always coming back to Sheriff George Yarnell of Elbert County in Colorado with the diagnosis that it had been predators who killed the cattle. He was getting upset about this because he knew that wasn't the cause, so he cut a flesh sample of his own (from a dead cow...hopefully) with a hunting knife and made a cut in it so he could identify it later. 
    This piece of flesh was sent to the chief of the CBI, Carl Whiteside (hey, this guy sure shows up a lot, don't he?), and he in turn sent it to Department of Veterinary Medicine at Colorado State University, where all the other samples had been sent. And--this is so beautiful--the piece of flesh that this guy Yarnell cut with a hunting knife off a cow was apparently cut by predators. 
    Well, we don't know what this guy did in his free time, but still...I don't think that's what they had in mind when they said "predators" did it.... 
    The point is, when a lab guy was confronted about how that flesh was really taken, he only said, "We're human. We make mistakes." 
    Yeah, so maybe you are (maybe). But that human never did explain why all the samples kept coming back saying that predators had done the slicing. 
    And maybe some cows died of disease and were later gnawed upon by scavengers. Sure. But saying all or most of them were killed by disease is basically calling the ranchers who owned these cattle stupid or uninformed. They know what disease and scavenger-marks look like--the better ones do, anyway, and the better ones were the ones who didn't buy the predator/blackleg business. It seems that people were just putting the "hysteria over normal events" theory out there because the events weren't normal, they knew it, and wanted to stop the panic from spreading. 
    Disease? What about those cows who the farmer or rancher saw earlier in the day who were perfectly healthy and then showed up dead that afternoon or night?
    But I forgot. "We're human. We make mistakes."
    But there is a theory to go along with that: Some humans were involved. Humans in the government. 
    That's next time on SkyWatch.        

SkyWatch: We've Got Cows. Dead Ones.

   

    So what now? Cows are popping up dead (dead and gross, a double whammy) everywhere (well, maybe not New York City or Los Angeles or Narnia, but you get my point). Who do all the farmers and cops and stuff blame?
    There were four main theories (five, if you count the one my friend came up with, which I'll probably mention later and has a bit more evidence to support it than some of the ones that people actually believed back then). 
    The first theory was, basically, the devil made me do it. That's right, people thought Satanists were out roaming the countryside chopping up cows and stealing their udders and eyeballs. And, admittedly, in a few places, circumstantial evidence made it certainly seem that cults were connected to at least some of the slayings, and I'm pretty sure they were. Just not the ones where the blood was completely removed without a trace and super-heavy-duty vacuum cleaners (or something) were used to suck out bone dust when fragments of bone had been removed.
    There was one police informant in Idaho who said he had gone undercover in a cult that said they had mutilated some cattle, but he never saw them do it. Isn't it possible that they were just making it up to gain some, um, "street cred" with other Satanist cults, the way gang members try to jack their cred up by taking out members of other gangs? "Yeah, man, you shoulda seen the way macho man over here carved up that steer in the name of Satan. It was freaking sweet, dude." 
    Yeah. That's totally what happened. 
    But it's not just that that makes it seem so unlikely that those cows were maimed to appease the Dark Lord (and no, not Darth Vader or Lord Voldemort; the other Dark Lord). Carl Whiteside (who was the Deputy Director of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation and involved with investigating a lot of this crap) summed it up pretty nicely when he commented in 1979 that if it was Satanists, how come nobody had gotten caught yet?
    I mean, look at it from a logistical standpoint. The range of mutilations was so great that it would have taken an entire army of cult members to kill all the cows that were turning up as mutes, a fact made especially inescapable when, you know, some of the mutes started turning up dead in the middle of the day. You'd think a black-robed figure would have been pretty visible in all that sunlight....
    Between 1975-77, there were more than fifteen hundred mutes that turned up across twenty two of our great states. If you take a good long look at those numbers, according to Jim Marrs's Alien Agenda, "the cultists had to locate, anesthetize, kill, and butcher more than two cows each day." And since, as far as I know, even cult members can't teleport, there's still travel time that needs to be accounted for, "the cultists would have had to spend every waking hour slaughtering cattle." Uh-huh. Really...?
    Thus begins the strange saga of A. Kenneth Bankston and Dan Dugan, two men who claimed to have information about the mass killings and the cult responsible. 
    Bankston was doin' time for bank robbery in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary when he wrote to Kansas senator Ross Doyen about the "Sons of Satan," the cult resposible for the cattle mutilations. He said that the blood was taken from the cows by needle, that the stolen genitals were used in rites for fertility, and also claimed that the two men would testify if they were brought to a smaller prison, where they would be safer from retaliation.
    Their story expanded a bit; according to the tales that each told separately, this cow-killin' cult (say that eight times fast) wanted to steal a nuclear missile and plutonium and blow crap up and kill people like Hubert Humphrey, who was then a senator in Minnesota. They were moved to a smaller prison, and Donald E. Flickinger from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms was brought in.  
    According to the two prisoners, the cult contained a range of people, from bikers to stockbrokers, and they operated in "at least twenty-two states." They used PCP (an animal tranquilizer, not the thing you did in college, so don't get excited) to drug the animals and amyl nitrate was used to get a rapid heartbeat so it would be easier to pull the blood out with the needle. Why were there no footprints? Why, those enterprising Sons of Satan wrapped their feet in cardboard to hide their tracks, and those burned spots in the ground that seemed to come from the landing gear of alien ships? Why, the cultists just made holes in the ground! I'm sure they made Daddy very proud, don't you?
    Of course, there were a few small problems with Bankston/Dugan's story. 
    Such as the fact that the guy they said was leading the cult was in jail most of the time the mutes were showing up, and other "members" all passed lie detector tests about their whereabouts at the questioned times.
    Oh, and Bankston and Dugan also broke out of prison. They were shortly recaptured, but that seemed to prove once and for all that they had only built up on rumors that they had heard in prison so they could get transferred to a smaller prison--one that was easier to escape from.
    Oh, yes. Daddy must be very proud.
    So when you look at the sheer numbers, the fact that the physical evidence didn't quite match up with the evidence that would accompany human intervention in the deaths of these mutes, and that two people who seemed to have proven once and for all that cultists were responsible were just, in fact, lying, it doesn't seem like cultists had anything to do with a majority of the slayings. Were they involved in some? Oh, I have no doubt of that. Sickies do things like that every day. But were they the ones walking around with the lasers removing udders and putting the dead cows in trees? I don't think so, sonny, and I would bet my Bible on that.
    Next time on SkyWatch (you need to imagine that being said in a deep booming TV announcer voice, or it won't be as fun--go ahead, try it!):
    Theory two: Hysteria!!!
     
   

SkyWatch: Dead Cows: The Beginning

    This post is going to be an overview of the cow-mutilation saga--something that, believe it or not, still continues today. It slowed down a bit in the eighties, and so it kind of dropped out of public view, but, yeah, old Farmer Ted is still walking out in his field in Wheretheheck, Kansas, and fining Elsie missing a tongue, her eyes, her udder, and all her blood.
    A warning, because I'm nice like that: Some of the images in this post and the next ones to follow will be pretty damn gross, so for all you squeamish people and vegans out there, you might just want to avert your eyes whenever the text stops. As the Man in Black said to the abductee: You've been warned. 

IT BEGINS

    It started, like disco, Afros, and Satan-possessed-my-car horror movies, in the seventies. Some, like the Snippy/Lady case (which will be brought up in another post, one of its own, because it requires a lot of room), happened in the late sixties, but by the early seventies everything was really getting into full swing.  

    According to Unexplained! Strange Sightings, Incredible Occurrences and Puzzling Physical Phenomena (2nd edition) by Jerome Clark, in "the fall of 1973, farmers in Minnesota and Kansas reported that their cattle were dying under mysterious circumstances." The animals appeared to have been killed "without knife or bullet" and the missing parts had been removed "with surgical precision." Even more puzzling than that (I know, amazing that something could be even more puzzling than that, right?) was the fact that absolutely no clue (footprints, tire tracks, all that good stuff that gets hundreds of murderers and muggers caught every day) had been left behind by the sick freaks that had done it.

       Deputy Gary Dir of Ottawa County, Kansas, stated, echoing the bewilderment of many law-enforcement officers of the time, "The large majority of these mutilations occurred near occupied houses. In no instances were the animals found less than a quarter-mile from the roadside and none...more than a quarter-mile from an all-weather, well-traveled road." (Unexplained!) 

Poor Bessie.

    Law enforcement officials and farmers were equally bewildered as more and more cattle showed up dead, and still there were no clues to the identity (or identities) of who- or whatever was responsible for the killings. As time went on, it was revealed that most of the "mutes" shared several characteristics, which I've helpfully compiled in a neat little list for you guys keeping track at home. 

• Lights in the sky. These lights--and, occasionally, objects--were often spotted in the sky just before or just after a mutilation was found, most of the time hovering above or near where the cow was found. In the "Alien Cowboys" episode of the National Geographic show Chasing UFOs, the team headed down to the San Luis Valley, a hotbed of recent mutilations, and learned that every time these mysterious lights were spotted in the sky at night, a few days later a dead cow would show up.
• Helicopters and vans. Black ones that appear to possibly be military but without any identifying logos or insignias have been known to show up, possibly tracking whatever is killing the cattle. White trucks or vans have also been spotted, some with government plates (but no, they don't know anything at all, remember that), in the areas. 
• No blood or bone dust. Usually there were small holes in the dead animal's throat, in the jugular vein (hey, maybe it's Dracula), and there was no blood around the wounds or on the ground, and nobody can ever account for where the blood might have ended up. There was some evidence that suggested at least some of the cattle were alive--unconscious, but alive--when the blood was drawn; sometimes evidence of a tranquilizer was found in the dead animal's system. Also, when pieces of bone had been cut through there was no dust left behind. But still, where did it all go? As Sheriff Ray Lee of Cheyenne County, Kansas, put it when he commented on the lack of blood: "You couldn't cut up an animal like that without getting nasty." 
• High-level anatomical knowledge. The cuts were often surgical-like in nature, and some gave the indication that surgical tools were used as well, although some of the work was done so well that Oklahoma State University vets said their students couldn't replicate what whoever the culprit was had done. 
• High heat. Sometimes cuts appeared to have been cauterized with high heat to stop blood loss around cuts and blood vessels, as if with laser technology. The problem with that? We didn't have any laser technology that could do that back then. Some of the cut skin had been roasted to a toasty 300 degrees Fahrenheit, but the cells weren't damaged at all. We still don't have any tech that could do that. 
• No tracks or traces. One dead cow was found dead in a fresh mud hole, but there were no tracks around it at all. Even in cases where the animals appeared to have been moved from one place to another, there were no marks indicating how or by who. 
• Movement. The missing blood at the sites could be possible if that was not the area where the animal had been killed. Most cases showed that the dead animal had been moved from one place to another, where it was found, and even if there was no evidence to show by who, there was evidence to show they had been moved: Some had broken limbs or spines, or parts like horns were pushed into the ground, like they had been dropped. Not just moved, but dropped, from some significant height. This was also echoed in the reports in "Alien Cowboys," where one cow was even found in the snowy bank of a river but there were no skid marks there to show if she had fallen from the top of the bank and died. Also, her parts were missing. One cow was found in a tree.
• Missing parts. Many of the organs taken in each case were the same, and these include: eyes, tongues, genitals, ears, pieces of bone such as jaws, udders in female cows, lips, rectums, and tails, with the genitals and udders being taken the most often. And, of course, the blood was missing. 
• Burn marks. Many of the animals were found in rings of burned or singed grass, or these were found nearby, along with crops flattened in a circle. Sometimes the carcass tested positive for trace levels of leftover radiation, and a research experiment showed that many times predators such as coyotes and crows actively avoided the mutilated carcass, which would help explain why many don't show any signs of scavaging or predation.

Aw, who wouldn't find that appetizing?

 

    You have your list now; study it well, for next post I'll be going more in-depth into various cases, possible military/government involvement, and just why the heck people think the aliens did it (besides all the proof above). In the meantime, why don't you go have a burger?    

Meet My Mascot

    I decided once I started SkyWatch that it would need a mascot, and since this whole thing started with my interest in cow mutilations suddenly spiking up (and since I dedicated this entire blog to Robert Urich and his dead-cow movie) I decided it would be a cow. I figured I would have one of my artist friends (I have many more than one) draw me a little cartoon cow to upload or something and that would be the end of it. Was it fate, then, or outside intervention of some kind (Alien? Ghost? The eternal attraction of a relatively cheap price?) that when I went with my dad to run errands one day that I was strolling along a toy aisle, minding my own business, and what did I see but a bin of plastic animals, and what animal should happen to be on top?
    No, under the rhino. A FREAKING COW!!!!!
    So that's how, for only $1.07 (although Dad covered the tax), I ended up with my mascot, Castle. 
    Feast your eyes (and nothing else, since he's plastic and probably wouldn't taste too good):

    This is my cow. 
    He enjoys grass, water, and not being abducted by aliens and experimented upon. 
    As far as I know, he has not been abducted and mutilated. 
    I would like to keep it that way. 
    When I asked him what he would like to say to his adoring public, he said, in a very emotional voice, "Moo." 
    He hopes you like him (and do not abduct and mutilate him). 
    He would like to thank one of my artist friends for drawing that clearly studio-quality background. 
    He enjoys making friends (of the non-ET variety) and hopes you like him too. 
    Coming next post: The beginning of my multi-post cattle mutilation arc!