The Shadow
Although cattle mutilations have been reported in the U.S. since the 1800s, the 1967 death of a horse named Lady in Alamosa, Colo., drew national attention to the mystery that remains unsolved.
The horse had been partially skinned, and her heart, brain, lungs, and thyroid gland had been surgically removed, not torn away as would have been the case if the death had been caused by a predator or scavenger following the work of an animal such as a coyote.
By the 1970s, increased cattle mutilations were more frequently reported, ones in which the cattle were missing their eyes, ears, anuses, utters, tongues and sex organs, and the mystery surrounding their deaths grew because no blood, no tracks and no footprints were left behind, leading ranches to conclude that their cattle were being killed by some kind of invaders in aircraft.
Credibility to the reports were increased after the Colorado Press Association voted the cattle mutilations story as the No. 1 story of 1975. More than 200 cattle mutilations had been reported by Colorado’s ranchers during the year.
By 1979, U.S. Senator Floyd Haskell from Colorado had requested the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate the cattle mutilations that were taking place on Indian lands in New Mexico.
Also, U.S. Senator Harrison Schmitt, a former astronaut who walked on the moon during the Apollo 17 Mission, concluded that the U.S. Government should launch an investigation into the cattle mutilations.
By 1980, the FBI had completed its investigation and concluded that the mutilations were being committed by common predators.
Five years prior to the FBI’s conclusion, Elbert County Sheriff George A. Yarnell who lived in a rural area south of Denver, reported that he had been around cattle all of his life and that the mutilations he investigated could not have been the work of predators because of the clean cuts that removed body parts, unlike the tearing of flesh that predators and scavengers inflict upon their prey. He had conducted 73 investigations of cattle mutilations at the time.
An investigation by the Iowa Department of Criminal Investigations blamed the cattle mutilations upon Satanists. However, the report did not explain the way members of a satanic cult could kill the cattle, remove their body parts, and leave no blood, no footprints and no tracks at the scene of the mutilations.
Ranchers, believing that their cattle were being mutilated by visitors in UFOs or government officials in helicopters who were harvesting body parts on which to experiment, began firing at low-flying helicopters, prompting the Nebraska National Guard to order their pilots to fly no lower than 2,000 feet, which was twice the height that had been the case prior to some ranchers’ firing at low-flying helicopters in response to cattle mutilations.
By 1996, Terry Sherman had purchased Skinwalker Ranch, a 521-acre ranch in a remote area of Northeastern Utah, and he soon suffered losses via cattle mutilations. He reported seeing strange creatures, a wolf-like creature three times larger than a normal sized wolf, one that he fired his rifle at to no avail.
He also reported a strange encounter with a humanoid-like creature perched in a tree, an unidentified entity with yellow eyes.
Linda Moulton Howe, a Stanford University graduate, won an Emmy in 1980 for her documentary film titled “A Strange Harvest,” based on her investigation of 1,000 animal mutilations.
Howe published “An Alien Harvest: Further Evidence Linking Animal Mutilations and Human Abductions to Alien Life Forms” in 1989, concluding in her book that extraterrestrials were most likely involved in cattle mutilations.
Skepticism about extraterrestrials being involved in cattle mutilations has prevailed in part because of the FBI’s conclusion about cattle mutilations being caused by nothing more than common predators and by other reports from other authorities attributing the cause to satanic cults.
For example, an investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that was concluded in 1980, the same year as the FBI report, attributed the cattle mutilations to an unidentified cult.
On May 22, the first episode of the third season of “The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch” was aired on the History Channel, an episode that features astronomers and rocket launchers who encounter and document a UAP, the new acronym the Pentagon recently coined to replace UFO, one meaning unidentified aerial phenomena.
Whether unidentified flying objects are referred to as UFOs or UAPs, the fact that in 1969 Jimmy Carter along with 12 others saw a UFO in the night sky as they were waiting to enter a building to attend a Lion’s Club meeting in Leary, Ga. provided validity to the UFO phenomena after Carter reported the sighting four years later in 1973 to the International UFO Bureau in Oklahoma City, Okla.
According to President Carter after his inauguration in 1977, the bright oval light moved in a manner at such high speeds that no known terrestrial aircraft could have moved from its 30-degree position above the horizon to speed toward him till it suddenly stopped and hovered near the tops of some nearby trees where it turned from bright white to green and red before being transformed back to white before it sped away.
President Carter had campaigned on releasing all information about UFOs, and after he became President, he ordered the CIA to turn over documents about UFOs. After reading the documents he was given, he concluded that some of the material should not be released for national security reasons.
Currently, Christopher O’Brien’s book, “Stalking the Herd: Unraveling the Cattle Mutilation Mystery,” along with his videos concerning cattle mutilations are drawing new attention to the continuing problem that costs ranchers millions of dollars, and Fox Nation is featuring his work via “Tucker Carlson Originals.”
