THE UNKNOWN: Animal Mutilations

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Do you ever stop and think how incredible the natural world is?

The idea that when we die, our bodies are absorbed back into the earth, the soil, that we become one with Mother Nature again.

She has a funny way of coming full circle like that.

So when something dies in such an unnatural way, it really calls everything we know about the cycle of life into question.

It disrupts the quiet balance when nature doesn't behave the way it's supposed to. It's unsettling,

which is why today's case is one we need to explore. For centuries, farmers, mostly in remote areas, have reported finding their livestock dead without explanation.
By come bedtime, they're fine.

But by the next morning, they have suffered the most gruesome fate.

I'm talking tongues or eyes removed with surgical precision, every single drop of blood drained from the animal's body, and no tracks or footprints leading to or from the animal signaling who could have done it.

And this hasn't just happened to a few animals. Thousands have been reported over the last several decades in the United States alone.
Which has me wondering: is it some sort of occult ritual?

Hungry predators, a bizarre disease, some top-secret government project?

Or are the answers not of our natural world?

I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is So Supernatural.

Animal lovers, beware, because today's episode is a hard one to stomach. But it's also so bizarre and mysterious that we just couldn't look away.
I'm Rasha Pecaro and I'm Yvette Gentile.

And if you're into the eerie, the unexplained, and the downright strange, well, that's probably why you're listening to this show. But chances are you've also heard about a chilling phenomenon.

One where perfectly healthy animals, especially cows, mysteriously turn up dead.

Not only is it devastating for the owners who've cared for and depended on these animals, but it also leaves them with a deep, unsettling feeling like something unnatural is happening right there in their backyard.

That's exactly how a man named Harry King felt.

In 1967, Harry's family owns a farm in the San Luis Valley in Colorado. He works there with his mother and his sister.

And around September 7th of that year, he starts his day like all the rest, by opening his barn and letting a horse named Lady out to graze. Everything else that afternoon is business as usual.

But at the end of the day, Harry goes back to the barn to make sure Lady made it home. Only she hasn't.

She's not eating at the trough or off drinking water or roaming free somewhere on the property either. In fact, There's no sign of her at all.

For the next day or so, Lady is nowhere to be found, which is really concerning because Harry knows this isn't like her. Lady might wander off from time to time, but she always comes back on her own.

Harry tries not to dwell on it. He assumes she'll be back eventually.
That day, on September 9th, he's taking care of some other matters about a quarter mile away from his farmhouse.

And that's when he finally spots Lady.

And not in the way that he had hoped. She's lying on her side, but she isn't breathing or moving.

It's clear she's already dead.

As Harry gets a better look, he realizes Lady suffered an incredibly gruesome fate. From the middle of her torso to the top of her head, she doesn't have any flesh or skin.

She's just sun-bleached bones.

Could a predator or a scavenger have eaten away at the flesh?

Sure, but if another animal had attacked Lady, you'd expect to find at least some blood nearby and probably tracks from whatever had killed her. Except there's no blood on the ground near her body.

No sign of any kind of struggle. No footprints either.
But it gets even stranger. Because Harry notices her lungs and other respiratory organs are also missing and her brain is gone.

But her skull isn't shattered or broken open.

Instead, there's a perfect hole right at the top of her head, like someone drilled through it just to get at the insides.

Now, you might be wondering, how do you remove an animal's brain through a tiny little hole.

Well, Harry's best guess is that someone must have used a suction tube or some type of similar tool to suck it out.

The same thing is true of a lot of the other missing organs. The holes and incisions on Lady's body are just too small for them to have been removed without surgical equipment.

Harry's been farming for a very long time, but he's never seen anything like this before.

None of this sounds like something a wild animal like a coyote, a wolf, or a bear would even be able to do. But Harry just can't think of a reason why a human being would do this to a horse.

So he actually reaches out to some friends, farmers, vets, and other experts to ask what they think happened. And no one can make any sense of it.

And before you know it, word of the mystery spreads around town, then through the county and the state.

Eventually, the case is making headlines all across America and everyone gives Lady a new nickname. They call her Snippy, which breaks my heart because, you know, horses are so precious, right?

And as more and more people learn about Lady, other animal owners begin coming forward. People who say they've also found animals mutilated in similar ways on their own farms.

For example, in 1970, three years after Lady's death, California newspapers say that someone discovered a headless goat dumped in a canyon.

The wounds were clean and precise, meaning it likely wasn't a scavenger or a predator. It appeared to be removed purposefully and by an intelligent being.

In 1974, over the course of about eight months or so, five different animals, a mix of cows and horses, are found butchered in Nebraska.

Their internal organs have been removed, and in one case, a steer is found, but it's missing its sex organs, one eye, one ear, and its tongue.

That year, there are so many animal mutilations in Colorado that state officials can't even keep track of them all.

There are also reports out of Utah, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Montana, and the list goes on.

For the rest of the decade, countless reports start appearing from farms and ranches all over the U.S.

And the accounts are eerily similar.

An animal is found dead, but there's no sign of what killed them. They didn't look sick and there's no evidence of a predator either.
Their cause of death is often impossible to determine.

There's also no indication that there was a struggle before their death. In fact,

the ground around them is always pristine.

No sign of a fight, no tracks, no blood. But I'm not just talking about the ground around the animal, like you would expect to see after the injuries they sustain.

Some of them have no blood in them at all,

almost as if they were completely drained of every drop in their bodies.

On top of all that, these animals are often missing their internal organs, things like their tongues, their eyes, or even their genitals.

And if you look at the wounds near where the organs were removed, The cuts are perfectly straight and precise.

Almost like what you'd expect if a a surgeon had removed everything with a knife or even a laser.

Again, this does not seem like a natural phenomenon. It feels like something that was done intentionally.

And if that is the case, there's one obvious follow-up question:

who is responsible?

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in the 1970s dead mutilated farm animals began popping up all over the united states no one knows exactly who's responsible for this

but a bunch of rumors and theories start appearing in newspapers because many farmers and ranchers say that when they found their their dead cows, dead horses, and other dead animals, they also spotted unmarked helicopters in the sky.

This is important because by law, helicopters must have certain placards and markings displayed on them. Flying an unmarked aircraft would be like driving a car with no license plate.

You're just not supposed to do it. Except the farmers keep seeing these unidentified helicopters near mutilation sites.

A lot of times they're literally hovering over the dead animal, not just passing over by chance.

And when the ranchers and workers drive away from the site, the helicopters sometimes tail them.

Some have even reported that the people in the helicopters fired guns at them. Like they really don't want anyone to know what's going on with these mutilated animals.

So the question is, who's in these helicopters and what in the hell are they up to?

Nobody knows for sure, but conspiracy theorists say that top secret government divisions use unmarked helicopters to do off-the-books operations,

which is why a lot of people suspect that federal agents are the ones killing, dissecting, and removing organs from these animals.

As for why they do that, one popular theory is that they're developing chemical weapons and they're secretly testing them on these animals.

Yeah, but the problem is, it's not clear what department is actually responsible for all of this. If it's the CIA, the FBI, the military, or some other group entirely.

But I can tell you this,

some farmers are so freaked out that they start patrolling their land with guns and firing at any helicopter that passes overhead, even ones that are clearly marked and not part of a secret operation.

Damn, that sounds like an episode of Yellowstone. Anyhow, it's unclear how often this happens.
But it's a big enough deal that politicians start getting involved.

A senator of Colorado asked the FBI for help in settling the matter.

Over in Nebraska, a government agency recommends that if anyone has to go out in a copter in their airspace, they should fly at a much higher altitude than usual just to avoid the risk of getting shot.

Some farmers and ranchers believe those unmarked helicopters might have doctors or scientists on board.

They could identify animals they want to study, then infect them with some kind of top secret disease or chemical weapon that they're developing.

Once enough time has passed for the experiment to take effect, they return to the farm or the ranch.

It's believed they shoot the test subject with a dart gun loaded with poison, which kills the animal instantly.

Then the scientist can land nearby, perform a quick autopsy, removing key organs to study them later.

Finally, these agents wipe away their footprints and destroy any sign they were ever there, except for one.

These scientists have to leave the animal's carcass behind.

Because a full-grown cow or horse can weigh over a thousand pounds, sometimes even close to 1,500 pounds, which is a lot of weight to add to any helicopter.

So the animal is left for farmers to find and wonder about. Okay, so I could totally buy that because that is a lot of weight to put on a helicopter, right? For sure.

Now, some people believe these alleged operations are completely top secret for a few reasons.

The first one is that the military doesn't want the general public and hostile nations to know exactly what they're capable of, which, okay, makes 100% sense.

But it's also worth noting that in 1969, President Nixon declared it was illegal to manufacture and transport chemical weapons.

So if an agency is conducting these kinds of tests, of course they need to hide what they're doing. But there are some really big issues with this theory.

The first being, reports of animal mutilations began before the chemical weapons weapons ban. Lady the horse died three years earlier in 1967.

So it's just unclear why they'd be so secretive and mysterious when their work isn't even illegal yet.

And if government agents are testing bioweapons, why would they choose to experiment on random farm animals?

It seems like it would be much more efficient to conduct those studies in controlled laboratory settings with their own test subjects.

That way, the scientists wouldn't have to leave butchered carcasses on farms all across the US. I couldn't agree more.
Of course, they could do this in their own labs.

Like, why go after farmers' property? Makes no sense to me.

But here's where it gets wild. In 1979, there are so many people spreading rumors about a government conspiracy involving these mutilations that the FBI actually gets involved.

They decide they need to investigate on their own to see if the U.S. government or anyone else is doing anything illegal.
In fact, a few other divisions run their own investigations alongside the FBI.

For example, Iowa's Department of Criminal Investigations, or DCI, looks into a bunch of mutilations that happened in their state.

So do the Royal Canadian Mounties, because this is going on north of the border too.

These researchers find that animal mutilations are not a new phenomenon.

There are documented cases going back all the way to the 17th century. Apparently, In 1606, various sheep were found dead outside of London.

Their internal organs and layers of fat had been removed, but their hides were untouched.

That case and older ones like it didn't get a whole lot of news coverage at the time. Lady the Horse's story really brought the phenomenon into the mainstream.

Well, it does seem like after Lady's case, The events either started happening more or people were just noticing it a lot more frequently. Because throughout the 1970s, reports just skyrocketed.

Some estimates say that roughly 1,000 animals were killed and mutilated over the course of a decade.

Though other newspapers speculate that a lot of these incidents never get reported to the proper authorities and the number could be much higher. Think thousands of cases by the mid-1970s alone.

So it's more important than ever to figure out who's doing this and why.

And after reviewing all of the evidence, the DCI and the Canadian Mounties both come to the same conclusion. There's no sign that a government bioweapon study was to blame,

but they do believe the animals died at the hands of humans.

particularly a cult, possibly with links to Satanism.

The FBI reports cite a bunch of Texas locals who say there's a devil-worshipping cult in the state called the Sons of Satan. But it's not only active in Texas, it's apparently a nationwide movement.

It's unclear how many members there are, but this group supposedly performs animal sacrifices.

Rumor says the ritual begins at midnight and lasts until dawn, and it involves ritually slaughtering a farm animal like a cow or a horse. And that's not the worst of it.

Apparently, the sons of Satan also perform cannibalism. And according to one report, members are encouraged to cut off their own fingers

and eat them to show their their dedication to the cult. So the FBI goes looking for these Satan-worshipping cult members who are allegedly missing fingers.

And guess what? They can't find anyone who fits that description.

But supposedly, there is a California-based motorcycle gang called the Sons of Satan.

who killed people by cutting out their hearts and offering them to the the devil. Problem is, these rumors are completely unverified.

At least one supposed member of the California gang confessed to killing a woman in 1970,

putting her heart in a car, then burning it as part of a black magic ritual.

But again, there's no hard evidence to back this claim up. And nobody is willing to come forward and say they know any members of the group.

There certainly isn't anyone claiming to be an active part of the cult themselves.

So eventually,

after a lot of digging, researchers learn where these rumors about the sons of Satan originated.

Apparently, sometime in 1974, a community college student wrote a research paper on the sons of Satan for a classroom assignment.

But it's kind of misleading to call it a research paper because the student didn't do much research. He just repeated a story he'd heard from a friend and failed to verify it.

His paper claimed that the sons of Satan were responsible for the cattle mutilations.

And he went into very graphic detail describing the ritual torture the cultists supposedly performed on these farm animals.

Somehow, his paper began circulating outside the classroom and even made it into the local papers. And that's what sparked the rumors and caught the FBI's attention.

So after reviewing all of this evidence, the FBI disagrees with the Iowa DCI.

The Bureau does not believe Satanists are responsible for the mutilations. They're not even convinced that the sons of Satan are real.

Instead, on January 15, 1980, the FBI releases a document with their own conclusions.

And their findings kick off a brand new conspiracy theory.

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From 1967 to 1980, at least 1,000 farm animals were killed and mutilated in the United States. And those are just the cases that we know about.

No one could tell who was responsible.

But the FBI investigated and in 1980 they announced their conclusion. And I have to warn you, it's frustrating.

They say the mutilations are a natural phenomenon. and people are just overreacting when they find ordinary cow and horse carcasses.
They think the dead livestock were all killed by predators.

They're saying there was no secret dart gun, no biological weapon, just your typical bear, bobcat, or wolf attack. They also say these predators probably just ate the missing organs.

As for the cuts that were super straight and precise, the ones that looked like they were made with a knife, Well, they say they were likely just the super sharp teeth of animals like bobcats and bears, which can leave straight precise lines.

According to the FBI, professional veterinarians all agree the supposed cuts on the mutilated animals are all consistent with bite marks.

The fact that the dead animals were apparently drained of their blood? Well, the FBI says that's just an optical illusion.

Blood coagulates after death. Basically, once your heart stops beating, the blood thickens and gravity pulls it to the lowest part of the body.

So if you're cutting a dead animal from the top or the side, it'll look like all of its blood has been drained because it's all pooled and hardened at the bottom of the corpse.

This whole process takes anywhere from six to eight hours. which is important because some ranches are hundreds of acres across.
Owners don't always find their animals right after they die.

Sometimes the corpses are several days old. So they only appear to be bloodless due to the advanced state of decomposition.

The FBI also says there is a psychological explanation for the huge uptick of reports that came out in the 1970s. The idea is that Lady the Horse made major headlines all across the world.

A lot of farmers read the story about her mysterious death. When they later found their own animals dead in similar circumstances, they panicked.

So they contacted the press that led to even more news coverage and even more media attention.

From there, The idea of an animal mutilation epidemic just grew. So much so that in 1975, the Colorado Associated Press announced that the phenomenon was the top news story of the year.

But according to the FBI, there's nothing to worry about. This is all completely normal.
Sort of a case of national mass hysteria, if you will.

Except there are a few details about their conclusion that just don't add up.

For one, a lot of the ranchers and farmers who found mutilated livestock say they didn't see any footprints near the carcasses.

And there's no way that coyotes, bobcats, wolves, or bears could have gotten at these animals without leaving prints behind.

Plus, like we mentioned before, in most cases, there was no blood around the dead body either. Not with Lady the Horse and not in any of the other mutilation reports that came afterward.

Usually, if a wild animal kills livestock, the victim will bleed before it dies. You'll see the blood spots on the ground.

Even if the blood inside the body coagulates afterward, there would still be blood around the body. But the farmers who have found mutilated animals say that's just not the case.

The death sites have been described as pristine.

So I have a very hard time with this whole predator theory. Well, the other thing is the FBI reports are pretty sparse.
There's no toxicology analyses or any sort of autopsy performed.

They don't address the biggest concerns or the most baffling elements of the mutilations. The FBI says it's because it's impossible for them to verify these things.

Conveniently, the state of decomposition makes it difficult to perform an autopsy or test for drugs or infectious diseases. But of course, to skeptics, that all sounds like an excuse.

On top of that, a lot of farmers and ranchers think the FBI theory is a bit condescending.

The Bureau claims that the animals owners aren't well trained or well educated enough to recognize the signs of an animal attack. I mean, come on.

But many of these people have been working around livestock for their entire lives.

They know better than anyone what it looks like when a bear or a wolf picks off one of their stock. And they all agree, these animals were not attacked by ordinary predators.

In fact, the official explanation is so dissatisfying that lots of people begin to suspect the FBI findings were,

you you guessed it, a cover-up.

That the government is just pretending this is a natural phenomenon to hide the truth. And before long,

another conspiracy theory emerges.

One that offers an alternative explanation about what the government could possibly be hiding.

Lots of people believe these mutilations were performed by aliens.

All right, let's unpack the evidence. Starting with the incident that brought animal mutilations into the mainstream, Lady the Horse.

A bunch of ranch workers and law enforcement officers noticed something strange in the days after her death.

Unidentified lights kept appearing in the sky all through the region. It started just one day after her body was found.
A local Superior Court judge spotted three orange lights zipping across the sky.

And here we go again, y'all, in a perfect triangular formation.

That same night, a pair of police officers were driving around in their squad car when they also saw an orange light. It actually followed them for a little bit before racing off into the sky.

which isn't the kind of behavior you'd expect from an ordinary airplane or even an unmarked helicopter.

Harry King, Lady's caretaker, also pointed out that when he first found Lady's body, he noticed that the grass around her looked singed or scorched, almost like a flying saucer had landed and burned the vegetation around it.

We talked about a similar thing happening in our episode. on the Westall UFO sighting.
The point is that Harry really truly believed that Lady had been killed by aliens.

But he didn't have any solid proof. All he knew for sure was that there were a lot of odd details that pointed to a possible visitation from outer space.

Again, there's no blood near her kill site and no possible way that a person or an animal could have killed and skinned her without making her bleed.

And the cuts on her body are so precise and careful, it seems like something intelligent sliced her up.

They worked intentionally and possibly with advanced equipment. It might be tempting to dismiss Harry's claims entirely.
It is a huge assumption to make.

However, Lady's death was not an isolated incident.

Once the animal mutilation trend began, so did another one, the UFO sighting trend. In March of 1975, a bunch of reports came out of Minnesota.
People who saw strange, unidentified lights in the sky.

That same month, a local farmer found two of his mules butchered.

Only he didn't discover the mules in their pen or on grazing land. They were out in a wheat field further away, and there's no sign of how they got there.

Even spookier, there was a crop circle in the field, a 15 by 30 foot oval, and inside the circles, all of the wheat was completely burned away.

Each dead mule was found at the center of one of those circles.

And when investigators examined the scene, they brought out a radiation detector, only to learn that the levels inside the circles were unusually high.

As bizarre as that sounds, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Each time mutilation reports roll in, people consistently spot strange craft in the sky, either right before or right after the dead animals are found.

Unfortunately, I don't have hard numbers, but apparently, experts agree this happens frequently enough that there must be some kind of connection.

And let's just remember something we mentioned earlier, that lots of farmers spotted unmarked helicopters flying near the animals' kill sites.

They assume this was the sign the government was responsible for the mutilations.

But if aliens did it, it seems just as possible that these helicopters belong to agents who are investigating or covering up the UFO phenomenon. In fact, we know that J.

Alan Hyneck investigated some animal mutilations.

Longtime listeners will recognize his name because he ran Project Blue Book.

That was a government-sponsored program meant to investigate UFO sightings and possible alien encounters.

Now, Blue Book shut down in 1969 and Hinek had mixed feelings about this because he really believed in aliens and he thought it was important for people to take UFO reports seriously and investigate them.

On the other hand, he was frustrated with the way Blue Book had been run. He felt like the officials were pressuring him to dismiss legitimate sightings or peddle obvious cover stories.

So around 1970, he began doing his own independent research. And in 1974, Hynek was looking specifically into cattle mutilations, which implies aliens were involved with these cases.

Or at the very least, that Hynek thought this was a possibility. And I have to say, remember Russia on Netflix, there was that documentary.

It was called investigation alien and george knap talked a lot about this as well he sure did the fact of the matter is there's no way to completely prove or debunk any of the theories we hear today

going by the evidence it seems possible that the animals could be falling victim to visitors from outer space

or a biological agent that the government is testing, or members of a highly secretive cult.

But as for me,

and I can assume my sister, I believe it's aliens. Aliens, aliens, aliens.
What do you think, Yvette? I absolutely believe it was an

intelligent being that did this because the precision that these animals were killed, it just doesn't make sense, right? That the scientists wouldn't take these animals to a controlled laboratory.

Exactly. Like, why would they do it right there on the farmland? It just doesn't all add up.

And why would they take the animals from these farmers when they could do this, like you said, like in a controlled environment, in a lab? Yeah. I mean, they test on animals sadly all the time.
Right.

And the fact that there's no, you know, evidence, like you don't see any footprints of bears or coyotes, it just, it doesn't add up. So I definitely believe aliens.

But there is one thing that is undeniable. These mutilations are very real

and very much a serious problem.

After all, a fully grown cow or horse is worth thousands of dollars. So each time a farmer or rancher's animal turns up dead and mutilated,

that hurts their bottom line. And to us, the animal itself is more important than the finances behind it.
Absolutely.

Well, some estimates say that the American agricultural industry has lost millions of dollars to the phenomenon. And it gets worse.
See, mutilations like these come in waves.

After the death of Lady the Horse in 1967, There was a huge uptick in these reports all through the 1970s. But by 1980, it seemed like the world had moved on.

There were fewer and fewer farmers and ranchers saying they'd lost livestock in this bizarre way.

Maybe whoever was responsible had all the information they needed by that point. So they were, who knows, winding down the experiment.
Except, fast forward to the spring of 2023.

In the course of a few weeks, seven different cows were mutilated in the state of Texas. They They are all in different counties, all owned by different farmers, and all found on different properties.

But

their deaths are eerily similar.

Every one of them is found lying on its side. Each one is missing its tongue.
When vets come to the scene, they're not able to identify a cause of death for any of the cows.

And there's no sign that scavengers have touched them. Almost like something is scaring off birds of prey, coyotes, and everything else from the remains.

On top of that, two of the cows are missing their genitals

and the hide around their sex organs has been cut off in a perfect circle. Almost like someone used a knife and a compass to trace it.

So when this news breaks, a bunch of Texans tell the press they're afraid that this will kick off a new wave. And sure enough, after they make headlines, more reports roll in.

A bull is killed and mutilated on a ranch in Oregon in December of 2024.

Its owner finds it, but it's missing its snout, tongue, eyes, and some of its reproductive organs. And the cuts to remove those organs were all precise and surgical.

And then there's a cow in Montana in April of 2025.

As of this recording, the police are still investigating.

But I do know its tongue and all of the skin on its face had been removed.

Sorry, I have to take a deep breath. This is a lot for me.

On July 23, 2024, another mutilated cow was discovered in Oregon. It was dead, but it was still in a sitting position,

which isn't a pose you'd expect to see if predators had killed it or if it collapsed after an illness.

We could go on because there are even more reports, all of which are strikingly similar, which does make it sound like we're at the start of another spike.

And we still don't know for sure who's doing this or why.

So what should we make of all of this?

Are these strange deaths part of a bigger, hidden truth about the mysterious universe that we live in?

Or is there something we have yet to understand about our natural world

and all the small nuances in the way it behaves.

Farmers are the heartbeat of America.

They understand the rhythms of nature better than anyone else. And when those rhythms are disrupted, they feel it first.

While the mystery of these mutilations remains unsolved, That doesn't mean it will remain that way forever.

With each new case, eyewitness report, and investigation, we move a bit closer to understanding life's bigger questions.

Maybe that's the most hopeful part of this: that in death and destruction comes new life,

new understanding,

new beginnings.

And sometimes it's in the darkest mysteries that we find the brightest sparks of discovery.

This is So Supernatural, an audio Chuck original produced by Crime House. You can connect with us on Instagram at So Supernatural Pod and visit our website at sosupernaturalpodcast.com.

Join Rosh and me next Friday for an all-new episode.

I think Chuck would approve.

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Winter's the perfect time to explore California, and there's no better way to do it than in a brand new Toyota hybrid.

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See your local Toyota dealer for hybrid battery warranty details.