Tuesday, January 20, 2015

The Cattle Mutilation Query

There is an interesting article recently highlighted by The Anomalist...published in the Santa Fe New Mexican, referencing cattle mutilation and the longtime research into the phenomenon:

Cattle mutilation is no bull, says Santa Fe resident David Perkins. He’s been studying this strange phenomenon since the 1970s. He’s written magazine and newspaper articles about it — one recent story even won him a journalism award in Colorado. He also has spoken at who knows how many forums, including one organized by a U.S. senator.

But after all these decades, Perkins, 69, says he really doesn’t know who or what is responsible for the mutilations.

“I honestly think there’s something very significant behind it. I don’t know what,” he said, laughing, during a recent interview at a downtown Santa Fe coffee shop. “But I know that there’s something there. … It’s hard to dispute that there’s something unusual going on, just by the sheer number of cases, news reports, interviews, law enforcement and on and on. It’s clearly a cultural phenomenon. And that’s how I’ve approached it from the very beginning.”

Cattle mutilation, he said, is “almost a Rorschach test of the American psyche, you might say.”

Though there hasn’t been much talk about cattle mutilations in recent years, back in the mid-1970s there were constant news reports here and elsewhere about dead cows with body parts that witnesses said had been removed in what appeared to be mysterious ways.

“Ranchers reported finding their animals dead with sexual organs removed, blood drained, and missing some combination of ear, tongue, eye, udder or patch of skin,” Perkins wrote in the introduction of Stalking the Herd: Unraveling the Cattle Mutilation Mystery by Christopher O’Brien, published last year. “Rectums were frequently described as ‘cored out’ … the incisions were frequently described as being performed with ‘surgical precision.’ ”

In the past, I have posted a few of the investigations by JC Johnson and his group Crypto Four Corners in relation to some of these mutilations. Here is a link to a more recent post detailing what these researchers have been seeing. Continuing with the article:

“I’m always battling the credibility issue, because it’s such a weird topic,” Perkins said in the interview. “It’s bizarre, scary, strange, kooky, whatever. But that hasn’t deterred me.”

Skeptics who mock tales of mutilations and all paranormal activity aren’t the only people who have questioned Perkins’ credibility. He’s also been dismissed by true believers of UFOs and those who embrace other mutilation theories — they say Perkins is too much of a skeptic.

“My conclusion after almost 40 years of devoting myself to this is that every theory has a fatal flaw,” he said. His insistence in pointing out those flaws gets him in trouble with those dedicated to advancing the theories. Perkins has had a pet theory of his own — that mutilations are connected with nuclear activity. This theory, too, has “fatal flaws” he said, but he still thinks “that may have some relevance.” Read more at Santa Fe man aims to solve mystery of cattle mutilations

The following information is a condensed version of an interview by Modern Farmer with Bill Ellis, who wrote about the cattle mutilation mystery in his book Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media

Modern Farmer: How old are these stories? How far back to they go?

BE: The earliest cycle of stories that I’ve seen date back to the beginning of the 20th century in England. There were cycles of panics that were caused by people allegedly killing and mutilating horses and domestic animals of various kinds. And there were a number of explanations that then created an additional flap on top of that, and that’s mostly what I’m interested in — when you have all of these theories that explain the mutilations and then those theories take on a life of their own.

There were two ideas: One was that there was a wolf that had been somebody’s pet that had escaped and was committing all of these mutilations. Wolves by that time were extinct in England, so there’s no way that an actual wolf could have appeared and done all of these things. And the other thing was that it was a lunatic – that there was somebody going around and doing this out of some kind of psychological compulsions. And in fact there was a person who was arrested and was tried and convicted of committing a number of these mutilations. And here’s an interesting twist: Arthur Conan Doyle, who was the creator of Sherlock Holmes, actually investigated the evidence and found a number of faults and determined that the person had been set up as the culprit because people had an ethnic prejudice against him — he was an East Indian, a scapegoat to blame for these incidents.

It’s something that then crops up in the popular press in a small way off and on in England and particularly in the United States until the ’60s, and it then becomes much bigger news, blamed initially on hippie cults. This was the time where there was a lot of attention being given to the counterculture and the interest of some people in non-traditional religions: cosmic consciousness and meditation. And it was a time that the actual Church of Satan in San Francisco was founded. That had generated a lot of press and a lot of concerns. The theory then became developed that what was happening was some of these young people had been recruited into some sort of cult that involved animal sacrifice.

MF: Why did people feel compelled to create these fantastic reasons behind the cow mutilation?

BE: I would say the short answer is that these are mythologies. These are large complex beliefs and stories and ideas that come together into a theory that explains not just mutilations, but explains lots of things about life. One of the reasons these mythologies are so popular is that it’s sort of an evil other side of intelligent design; there’s something beautiful or clever or fascinating about life on earth, and that’s evidence that a supernatural creator designed that animal or that feature of nature that way. If something bad happens, you lose a valuable animal out in your field and when you get to it, it seems to have been drained of blood and it’s got an ear and other body parts missing and nobody can explain any good reason why — some evil “other” must have done that. And if bad things happen it’s because some evil force or some group of evil people are doing that. And that for lots of people, believe it or not, is a much more satisfying explanation for the world that we live in.

MF: Have cattle mutilation stories changed at all over time?

BE: The actual natural event tends to be pretty similar. Where things differ are with the interpretation of the details.

At one point there was supposed to be kind of a occult significance as to whether the left ear or the right ear was missing. People would look over what they thought were surgically precise cuts that were made on the side of the animal to see if they represented some kind of an occult symbol. And then you’ve got the quasi-scientific explanation, which is that these body parts are being biopsied, and they’re being moved by extraterrestrials. I think the UFO explanation now seems to have gotten somewhat old. Now maybe if I were out in the Great Plains, I would find a lot of people out there who were still talking about the “black helicopters.” The black helicopters were what the aliens used to commit the mutilations and biopsy the animals. And that generated a tremendous amount of rumors and beliefs, all because it was obvious that [the helicopters] were not made by humans because they were silent. A silent helicopter was obviously an alien spacecraft. I think that all of these will be seen against the ground of real suspicion of the federal government, because they all come with the proposition that the government knows a great deal more about what’s going on than they’re letting on, and the reason they’re not telling you why these mutilations are taking place is because they don’t want you to know.

NOTE: Perkins and O’Brien are beginning work on a follow-up, tentatively titled “MuteSpeak: Stalking the Stalkers,” which will contain what Perkins says will be a deep analysis of the major theories about who or what is behind the mutilations. Lon

Enter the Valley: UFOs, Religious Miracles, Cattle Mutilations, and Other Unexplained Phenomena in the San Luis Valley

Skinwalker Ranch: No Trespassing

America's Strange And Supernatural History: Includes: Prophecies Of The Presidents

Close Encounters of the Fatal Kind: Suspicious Deaths, Mysterious Murders, and Bizarre Disappearances in UFO History

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