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!!!
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