Cattle Mutilation with Rachel Monroe

I feel like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was probably so annoying.

Like you're trying to have a trial and he's like, excuse me, I wrote some stories once, you know, and you're like, you okay, you want to decide who gets convicted of crimes now?

Welcome to You're Wrong About.

I'm Sarah Marshall.

It's the holidays.

And naturally, we're talking about cattle mutilation.

We are joined today by Rachel Monroe, contributing writer for The New Yorker, chronicler of some of the weirdest stuff in America, and all-around friend of the show.

If you did not waste your adolescence watching the History Channel, cattle mutilations were a phenomenon that apparently occurred in the 1970s.

They inspired a lot of conspiracy theories.

They're their own little footnote to the satanic panic.

And like so much else, trend-wise, they are coming back.

And I wanted to get Rachel onto the show to tell us about

why we are bringing back not just the fashions of the past, but some of the conspiracy theories as well.

This is a story about some very wild UFO and or satanic panic and or insert the conspiracy of your choice theories that emerged.

And that part is for me very fun to talk about, but we are basing it off of some actually

sad and inexplicable things that did happen to some real animals.

And we do get into a little bit of the specifics of what happens when we talk about an alleged cattle mutilation.

There's a little bit of gore.

There's a little bit of that kind of stuff, but it's not something that we're trying particularly hard to linger on.

We're really trying to talk about the American mind.

We've got some fun bonus episodes for you as always on Patreon and Apple Plus subscriptions.

You can listen to me talk to Kelsey Weber Smith about urban legends and the movie Urban Legend.

And most recently we are doing something I've been threatening to do for a few years now.

I've done an audiobook for you.

We have made a You're Wrong About Original audiobook of Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol read by me.

And And so we're putting out staves one and two.

That's setting the scene and then the ghost of Christmas past.

And that's our bonus for this month.

And then for December, we have the rest of the story.

Happy week after Thanksgiving.

If you're traveling home from some kind of a family something,

Godspeed.

You did a great job.

Take good care of yourself.

We're so happy to share this one with you.

One of the weirdest activities attributed to aliens is the bizarre mutilation of animals.

Scattered stories of carved-up livestock and strange lights in the sky date back to the 1890s in the U.S., but it wasn't until the early 1970s that a pattern began to emerge.

Roving bands of shadowy Satan worshipers are frequently mentioned as possible culprits in the mutilations.

Some researchers insist there just aren't enough devil worshipers out there, especially in rural areas, to commit such widespread mayhem.

How's investigations have found an unusually high correlation between mutilations and UFO sightings?

In some cases, the strange lights in the sky are soon followed by mystery helicopters, leading some to speculate that the UFO mutilators are being monitored themselves by someone with a lot of helicopters.

Is it a modern folk legend or is something really going on here?

Tomorrow, a scientist who says he worked on flying saucers.

George Knapp, Eyewitness News 8.

Welcome to Your Wrong About, the show where sometimes we talk about some of my own personal fixations based on growing up watching cable TV in the 90s.

And with me today is Rachel Monroe, and we are going to talk today about truly one of my favorite topics, which is cattle mutilation.

Hello, Rachel.

Hi.

You know what the real mutilation heads call it?

They just call them mutes.

I actually have written in my Google Calendar cattle mutes in all caps to convey my excitement.

It just feels cooler.

It really does.

And Rachel, is it literally true that you are the New Yorker's Texas correspondent?

That's certainly how I describe myself.

So I guess that makes it true.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What have you written about recently?

What have you written about not so recently?

What should people find of yours?

Whatever will be recent will be in the future for present me as we record this.

So I would just go on to, I wonder if Twitter will even exist.

Who knows?

Find me on the internet at The New Yorker and see what I will be so interested to hear,

what I have written between now and then.

And I'm also the co-host of a new podcast called Bad Therapist, which is about bad therapists.

You can check that out too.

Michelle, what more could you want?

Exactly.

Exactly.

Let me give you my baggage with this, and then you can tell us about what's going on.

This is a topic that I think the average listener is either like, oh my God, yes, please talk about what's going on in cattle mutilation, or they're like, what on earth are you?

What?

This is something I feel like I learned about in like creepy travel channel paranormal specials in 1999, probably narrated by Zelda Rubinstein, talking about any creepy thing that had been alleged to happen in 20th 20th century America that a cable TV show producer could get their hands on, you know.

And so what I remember learning is that in the 70s, and then this came up again, of course, in my satanic panic research, and I'm sure in yours, that there was this spate of ranchers and I think the American Southwest, like Texas and New Mexico and stuff, alleging that their cattle had been mutilated by forces unknown.

And I feel like the phrase surgical precision appears a lot.

Yes.

And that's supposed to to be a really creepy phrase.

But I have to, you know, some surgeons, you know, are not that precise.

So we have to.

Surgical imprecision, I guess, would be more is a scarier phrase.

And that really makes you think.

But that like cows would have like their udders excised or maybe their, you know, different body parts excised, but it was like, it looked like it had been done with a scalpel.

It didn't look like it had been done by animals.

Although what their level of expertise and knowing what the work of an animal looks like was is in question.

And that then that got wrapped up in, you know, both UFO stuff and satanic panic stuff.

And people were saying that like, I saw a black helicopter in the area.

So therefore Satanists came down from a helicopter and mutilated the cattle to like steal the blood for the rick, because people were kind of drawing a straight line between the two main paranormal stories at the time.

And we're like, well, it makes sense for the Satanists to be doing the cattle too.

And then we kind of didn't talk about it for a long time.

And then just recently, there have been news articles about cattle mutilation and like the New York Times and stuff that I've seen.

And I've been like, I really felt sure that we had kind of decided we thought that this was the work of foraging animals.

and bugs and maggots and stuff.

I thought that this was something we had solved, but now I'm seeing it re-emerge as a topic that's making everyone scratch their heads and also is coming at a time of renewed panic about satanic cults.

And then I think we were talking, and this came up, and I was like, Rachel, take me away, take me on the satanic panic 70s 2020s UFO cattle mutilation ride.

And here you are, and I'm so excited.

Here's my ticket.

Yeah, I think there's something about it that feels retro.

As far as I can tell, nobody got arrested.

You know, nobody served long

false prison sentences.

Nobody was killed.

I mean, except some cows, but the consequences of this panic weren't as dire.

So it can be, you can kind of like wander in these strange fields without like feeling quite as

tragic as you can with some of the other stuff that it's associated with, you know?

Maybe we can start by the

first famous mute of the modern era who was not actually a cow, but a horse.

Oh, Oh, no.

And the horse had the unfortunate name of Snippy.

Oh,

you know, that's just a little bit.

Yeah.

Oh, Snippy.

Snippy was a three-year-old Appaloosa living in Alamosa, Colorado.

And Alamosa is like sort of southern, southern, rural, southern Colorado kind of farmland.

And there had been like a spate of UFO sightings.

This is in the 67.

And then all of a sudden, this horse does not come home for dinner, which is unusual.

And then a few few days later, they find her body.

And I've seen photos of Snippy, and it's like Snippy looks weird.

Basically, all of the flesh is gone from her head and her neck, and the rest of the body looks pretty intact.

So, this is like not what we would end up calling a classic mutilation, but it's just like Snippy's dead, and it looks weird.

You should have your own oxygen show.

Thank you.

I'm angling for it.

And this, it just becomes huge local news.

And there's something about this story that, like, looking back at it, I'm like, oh, the cow mutilation phenomenon was in some ways a product of like a robust local news culture that no longer exists.

Oh, my God.

Oh, Rachel, I'm sad now.

Yeah, the mutilation of the American newspaper.

Well, now we have Facebook groups.

Well, and

I like have to stress that these photographs of Snippy look weird.

And I'm not a, you know.

Should we look at Snippy?

I would like to.

You should Google Snippy.

And then I also sent you some news headlines, which I think get at like how big a story this was.

But I mean, it's like,

in a way, it sort of seems like a meme before, a pre-internet meme.

You know, like these, just these photographs of things that look weird have always traveled.

Oh, okay.

I'm looking, yes, I'm look, okay, I'm looking at the Denver Public Library's website.

Thank you, Denver Public Library.

And yes, Snippy,

her body is intact up to the neck, and then her neck is cleaned of everything except vertebrae.

And then, and then her head, too.

So it's just like, right, everything is, but she's, it's really striking to see, and there is a clean cut where the like flesh and the body end.

I don't have a great explanation for this.

I mean, they did do a necroscopy of

Snippy and found that it seems like she died of an infection they found some like bullet holes in a flank so maybe that was like the source it's like some she got shot somehow and there was like an infection came from that you know was the infection such that the scavengers only wanted to eat part of her i don't know i don't like scavenging as you know the more of these like mute uh images you look at the more you're like yeah it's it's there's not really a wholly consistent pattern like sometimes just like weird things happen and like decomposition looks creepy and gross.

Right.

How many people really have a great sense of what decomposition looks like?

But then interestingly, the answer to that you would think maybe would be ranchers.

Yes.

You had the idea like when you were doing your intro, like, oh, this was big in Texas.

It actually wasn't big in Texas.

It was like,

it was not the big kind of like livestock operations.

They didn't really have mutilations, or if they did, they didn't talk about them.

It was like the small ranchers, the part-time ranchers,

often in like parts of the country where there weren't a lot of cattle.

That's where the phenomenon happened most.

Yeah, and I sent you some of the headlines about Snippy.

I mean, it's just crazy that you have like a dead cow looks weird, you know, inspires like this, is just a sampling,

but I think they're funny.

Okay,

okay.

The first headline is: Snippy Snippy remains the talk of the town.

And then it's someone posing with Snippy's skeleton, which has been like arranged and mounted nicely somewhere outdoors.

Where is Snippy now?

Can you go, can we, can we go see Snippy?

You know, apparently somebody tried to auction off the skeleton on eBay for $50,000 and nobody bought it.

And so now Snippy's skeleton is in a warehouse somewhere.

Oh my God.

Like an old animatronic.

But, you know, it seems like like a good crowdfunding opportunity.

$50,000 seems really quite a bargain.

For a piece of history.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Oh, my God.

God, you weren't kidding.

The second headline is, Snippy May Rise Again.

Like,

what?

The third one is my favorite, though.

Okay.

And then this one is, it looks like an op-ed.

It's got a little photo of the author looking concerned, looking thoughtful.

And then the headline is, was Snippy attacked by ants?

Which I think is a good question.

It is.

Well, the article is like basically a mousepiece for a German biochemist who was like apparently passing through the region at the time.

And he was like very upset that people were associating Snippy's death with UFOs.

And he was like, no way it was UFOs.

It was obviously a giant colony of radioactive ants.

It's true.

God bless you, Snippy.

I'm sorry that you had, you gave your life and such a weird piece of culture was built around you by a species you probably had no understanding of, really.

Well, and there's, I mean, I feel like we're doing an important part to fight against Snippy erasure because, you know, when this comes back in the 70s, it's always talked about as cow mutilation, right?

You never hear about horse mutilation.

You never hear about snippy as the origin.

You do never hear about horse mutilation.

Well, I will say that I like like went down a bunch of like strange detours when researching this.

And there was like a whole phenomenon in the UK in like the late 19th, early 20th centuries called horse rippings,

which is like the English equivalent of cow mutilation.

But it's yes,

which is a terrifying phrase.

Yes, it says everything about English people that we have the same kinds of crime, but they call it something so wonderfully euphemistic, like horse rippings.

I don't think in any way it's like the majority of these cases, but it does seem like some of some of these animals were harmed by humans.

In most cases, that's not what seems to have happened, but there are some.

There's like an incredible case called the Great, they were called the Great Riley Outrages, which is like a spate of horse rippings in the English countryside in 1903.

And a guy got like possibly wrongfully convicted, and then Arthur Conan Doyle got really obsessed with it and like went to visit the guy in prison and saw that he was reading the newspaper.

Like he held it very close to his face, and Arthur Conan Doyle was like, aha, clearly he has bad eyesight.

And so like, there's no way that he could have gotten away with all this nocturnal maiming and like basically like got him out of prison.

But wow, it kind of seems like maybe he did it.

Anyway, that's that's on podcast for another time.

I feel like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was probably so annoying.

Oh, totally.

Like, you're trying to have a trial, and he's like, Excuse me, I wrote some stories once, you know, and you're like, you okay, you want to decide who gets convicted of crime?

Yeah.

However, did you see how closely he was reading his newspaper?

Oh, and it's like, sir, with all due respect, you do believe in fairies.

Yeah,

totally.

But so, horse rippings aside, the mutilations like really start to kind of like kick off as a phenomenon in 1973.

First in like Kansas and Nebraska.

Dick Nixon in office, no cattle mutilations.

Nixon leaves office, mutilation city.

Oh, no, there's like a big Nixon tie.

We'll get to it.

Oh, okay.

It's basically one of these situations where we have like the local papers cover it, and then like the Kansas City paper covers it, and then Newsweek picks it up and like the more news coverage there is the more reports there are and you know like that doesn't mean that it's fake like that could just be you know people saw something and then they they connect it to this broader phenomenon that they wouldn't have otherwise but then like all of a sudden the the narrative also starts to like coalesce around

a certain like group of characteristics.

You know, it's not just like Snippy is a horse and is dead and like looks weird.

It's like, okay, now it's got to be a cow

and it's got to be like usually the eyes and tongue and ears, at least an eye and ear are gone.

And then, as you said, the sex organs surgically removed with surgical precision and the rectum is cored out, which I really is gross.

Oh.

Like little zines will start to pop up.

This is like so, it was just so much more fun in the 70s, you know?

Like you had to work for, you had to like mimeograph your like cattle mutilation zine.

Fucking anyone can be a conspiracy theorist now.

You just turn on a front-facing camera, you know, but back then, oh my God, the typesetting involved.

You had to literally cut and paste.

One of the big ones was by Ed Sanders, who's like the guy who wrote what I think is the much better, like Manson, early Charles Manson book about the Manson family

called The Family.

These zines are sort of like, they'll offer, like people are offering to like trade photos with each other or like, I'll send you, you, you know, I have a copy of these like veterinarian reports.

Like, do you have any photos of like unusual carcasses?

And people would trade these things back and forth.

It had like a real kind of hobbyist vibe.

So, and is this like, because communities of small farmers who are doing this, did, would you, what's the social scene like?

I think there's like maybe two levels, right?

They're like the farmers who have the cows, who are reporting the cows, and then there are the people who are really interested in the information about this stuff.

And those aren't really like the same worlds, right?

You know, like

the people who are like the most interested in the phenomenon are people who are, have an interest in occult or conspiratorial things.

Otherwise, the farmers are just sort of like a source of that information.

Huh, right.

And so there could be like a story that's big in your town, and so you share it around, and people elsewhere in the country find about it.

Yeah, exactly.

And so that's just like in a lot of these conspiracy things, it's like the second and third hand knowledge.

The stories like start to kind of conform more and more to type, you know, like, or you'll have like radio shows were also really big, like radio call-in shows and people, like, I, you know, my neighbor told me that whatever.

And then these phrases, like particularly like surgical precision, start to become almost like a requirement, like part of the lore.

There's a, there's a really funny investigation.

There's like an FBI agent, like a kind of exhausted former FBI agent who gets brought in to investigate this stuff later in the 70s.

And there's this amazing scene in his report where he like is actually going out to, you know, when somebody reports a mutilation, he'll go there and try to see it for himself.

This is in New Mexico.

And he goes out to see, you know,

ranchers called in a mutilation.

He like comes up, he looks at it, and he's like, dude, I can see bite mark.

Like there are clear bite marks around this count.

Like, why did you say surgical precision?

And the guy's like, well, that's just, you know, everybody says surgical precision.

It's just, it's just what you say.

Right, exactly.

As in many kinds of conspiracy situations, like, like what gets counted as being like spooky or strange is like, it's like a shifting signifier, right?

Like, people will be like, there were no markings around the cow.

Or they'll be like, there were drag markings around the cow.

Like, it decayed really slowly, or actually, it decayed really quickly.

You know, like the dogs were barking, the dogs weren't barking, you know, like any of these things can like become is sort of said in the like hushed tone of weirdness, like can seem weird.

Like whatever, once you've decided that it's weird, then like everything about it starts to feel weird.

If that makes sense.

This is such an interesting moment in culture to say like we need to take our fears seriously in the sense that like fear is this useful tool for understanding like when we're in danger, when a situation doesn't make sense, like when there's something like bigger wrong with the picture, but that you also have to simultaneously acknowledge that like

the things you

think when you are afraid are not made more true by your fear during the situation.

And of course, my example always for this is 35-year-old white women who go to Walmart and think they're about to be trafficked because a black person is in the same aisle as them twice

and is on a Bluetooth or something.

You know, the stories that get shared around on Facebook and that have this tenor of like, because I felt scared, that means I was in danger, which then can get turned into, because I felt scared, I had to call the police and potentially contribute to killing someone, which has

been a trending topic in this country with very good reason.

And I think that there's no conflict of interest there, right?

I think that we can acknowledge that human reasoning is affected when we, in a state of fear, feel ourselves unable to avoid viewing everything we encounter as a threat.

And that's sort of a physical and emotional state we can get into.

And I don't know, it means nothing more than that we can better evaluate evidence when we're in a calm state.

That the fear itself is important information, but it doesn't mean that the conclusions we draw while in a state of fear have to be true.

Totally, totally.

And there's, I mean, one of the most interesting explanations that I've read about the mutilation stuff is from this guy who named Michael Goleman, who I believe is an anthropologist teaching in Mississippi.

And like, from what I can tell, like, most of his work is about like the removal of Confederate statues.

But he wrote this paper, I think in the 90s about cow mutilation that's really good.

But he makes this, he ties it to this stuff that was happening in the beef industry.

And like, first of all, we have to like just emphasize how huge of a story this was.

I I think this is something that people that I didn't realize.

Like, the FBI was involved.

The Mounties did an investigation.

The ATF did an investigation.

You had like DAs from many states.

There are like law enforcement conferences.

There's like editorials in the Denver Post.

There's like senators, you know, it's not, it's not like a fringe thing.

Right.

It's not just the weekly world news.

Yeah, exactly.

The Colorado Associated Press voted this the number one story in the state in 1975.

Wow.

Enormously huge as a story.

And yet you never hear about Jack Torrance reading about it in The Shining.

And is the implication kind of that like, oh my God, we're hearing about these farmers experiencing cattle mutilation.

What if this becomes a bigger problem and affects America's beef industry?

So the beef industry thing that Michael Goldman writes about, which is super interesting, is he's just, he's just sort of looking at the timeline.

This kicks off in 1973, peaks in 1975, and like really dies off by like 1979.

And he's like, huh, that really precisely coincides with this huge crisis in the beef industry where you have Richard Nixon.

So this is like the stagflation.

era, right?

Where you just have like food prices in particular are like spiking wildly out of control you have famine in many parts of the world and so the united states is like shipping grain overseas to help which is like causing the price of grain in the united states to rise even more like doubling you know within six months so it becomes like very expensive to be a cattle farmer, particularly like a small-scale cattle farmer.

And then Nixon institutes price controls, which is like such a wild thing to imagine.

It's completely impossible to imagine this happening now, at least for me.

He just caps the price of beef.

Wow.

Nixon the communist.

I know, right?

Oh, and the other important part of this is that before it became kind of cow mutilation became associated with UFOs, and kind of like alongside, or maybe a little bit before it became associated with satanic cults, before those theories was this idea that the government was doing it.

The early cow mutilation sightings were all, or many of them were accompanied by like the idea that there was like a black helicopter.

Farmers were reporting these like unmarked helicopters were hovering.

Sometimes they were reporting that the helicopters were shooting at them.

And the like prevalent idea among most of these farmers at that time was like the government is doing weird experiments on like biological or chemical weapons on our cows.

You know, because like, of course, they do nefarious nefarious experiments.

Like they're, they're up to some pretty bad shit.

That's been demonstrated in the past, right?

Like you don't have to believe in conspiracy theories that there's no proof to support in order to believe that, I really think.

However.

If the government wants to experiment on cows, they can just buy some cows.

They can do it in one of those secure facilities they're always protecting with heavily armed watchtowers, don't you think?

Totally.

And we do know that at this time they were like like dosing college students and prisoners, you know, with like all sorts of weird things in their experiments.

Like, there's no, you know, like, why do they want to go steal your cow?

You know, like, it's not really the vibe.

It feels like we, it makes sense that America in 1973 would be more ready to worry about livestock than

lefty college students and inmates.

Totally, yeah.

But there, you know, like, it's also not, it's not completely wild.

I mean, I didn't didn't know about this but apparently there was a there was a situation in Utah a few years earlier where 6,000 sheep in a place called Skull Valley

just like collapsed and like convulsed and died and the shepherd was like what is going on and it turns out that there was like an army base nearby that was like testing out nerve gas I think that this was the inspiration for Stephen King's The Stand.

Oh, really?

I might, yeah, I might remember it wrong, but I think that he said somewhere, like, I know he's referenced this at some point, and about how, like, it makes you think, right?

Because if the wind had blown another way, it could have gone into Salt Lake City or something like that.

Yeah.

I don't know that, like, that's one of the interesting things about the way American government functions, I think, that maybe you have to live here to understand that, like, the kind of paranoia people feel about the government is hard to dismiss when you think about what it's done and what it's done, not just to regular Americans, I would even say, but like with the attitude that like regular Americans kind of simply don't matter, that we're kind of all NPCs is what you feel when you read about some of this confidential government history.

That gets denied and denied and denied.

And then finally, you know, like much too late is like, oh yeah, well, whoops.

Right.

Like stuff like MK Ultra, right?

Where the CIA is trying to create superstuctures by giving them horrific quantities of LSD, where it's like, is is this even a constructive use of anyone's time?

But yeah, I mean, but it is interesting.

There is something interesting about the like government conspiracy angle of it where like one of the Ed Sanders hypothesis is like, oh, okay, so after that incident with the sheep in Skull Valley and like a couple others, the government was like, okay, we're not gonna, we're not gonna test nerve agents on animals anymore.

So they like publicly agreed to do that, but privately still wanted to do it.

And so they were like doing, abducting these cows and then also returning them,

which you could just maybe kidnap the cow.

Seems like a bad way to just, it seems like you forgot the part about disposing of the evidence.

There's just something about the idea that the government both

will follow its rules, but then will do this, like find this elaborate kind of loophole to get around it.

It both is like, seems to like respect and mistrust the government at equal parts.

It's funny.

I'm a big believer in the idea that people are going to do things the easiest way possible.

And the idea of going to all these different farms and picking one cow from each.

Yeah.

You know, and all these different helicopter missions.

How many choppers do you need?

Like, why not just...

Like, you know, we got to get the budget down, don't we?

I mean, not if it's the government.

Not if it's the American government.

Yes.

A debate at the time is it like, okay, are the helicopters like picking up the cows and then they're mutilating them and then kind of putting them back?

Or is the helicopter like dropping off, you know, the scientist who mutilates the cow and then the scientist is like taken off?

Right.

Can you fit a cow in a helicopter?

And then did anyone try to do that?

Exactly.

As this paranoia spreads, you have like a spate of people like literally shooting at helicopters to the point where the BLM like did land surveys via helicopter and they stopped doing them because they were just like,

people were shooting at them.

They're like vigilante groups that form that start doing like traffic stops on cars that have like out-of-state plates.

Oh my God.

A utility helicopter that's repairing power lines gets shot.

The Nebraska National Guard ordered all of their helicopters to fly at 2,000 feet instead of 1,000 feet because like people were just like ranchers were just shooting at them.

Wow.

It's just a huge fear.

Yeah.

Michael Goldman's theory is basically that this is like this displaced fear and anger about the federal government's kind of meddling with the cattle industry, which is like, is true and was happening, that instead of like being upset about price controls, it kind of like manifests in this more viscerally scary format.

You know, it's not like some bureaucrat in DC.

It's like somebody is literally like taking my cow and herding it.

Well, and the black helicopters feel so connected to the sort of human trafficking conspiracy theory idea of white vans.

It's the generic version of it, right?

It's the most common color of van and helicopter, I'm sure.

I mean, what do I know about helicopters?

But you don't see a lot of like brightly colored ones, I don't think.

We can only register so much of the information that's coming at us at any given time.

And some of the things that like we feel like we notice suddenly actually have always been there, but we just have never paid attention to them before.

Yeah, exactly.

As the as the kind of stories are like accumulating in 1973, 1974, 1975, early 1975, you have this guy in Colorado, again, with these like one of these small weekly newspapers.

His name is Dane Edwards, and he runs the Brush Banner, which is a weekly newspaper in Brush, Colorado.

Love it.

And he starts like covering, you know, like the local mutilations

very actively.

It starts in July.

There's like a thousand-pound cow with, you know, had its nose, one eye, an ear, and its tongue cut away.

No footprints.

He reports that the local sheriffs' deputies were unable to take a photo of the carcass with like their Polaroid camera.

they would like take a picture, but then the picture would be too dark.

He's like putting a, basically like putting a mutilated cow on the cover of the weekly paper like every week and keeps it going.

He's like, as a beat reporter, he's doing a good job.

Like he

gets some good quotes.

He interviews an Episcopal priest.

It's like, are we ever going to cover inflation?

No, like, why would you?

He interviews a coven of witches in Denver, which is fun.

He just wanted an excuse to talk to the witches.

I like the Episcopal priest is like, oh no, I don't think that it's a cult because like none of the items that were removed from the cows were used in, are the kinds that are used in satanic rites.

And you're like, how do you know which ones are and which ones are they?

As an Episcopalian in the 70s, I think I would feel bummed about being left out of the whole exorcist cultural moment.

And I would just be looking for ways to be considered relevant.

Right.

Yeah, he just keeps, he keeps covering this and then he starts to like hint that he's being threatened or his coverage.

He's saying, you know, like other, like the big newspapers in Denver, like they're not covering this because the government is pressuring them.

He writes to the senator, his senator, and says, like, he's been threatened by government agents and told to keep, he needs to like stop covering this story.

He says like his office gets broken into, like, blood is thrown onto his door at home.

And then he vanishes in December.

Wife files a missing persons report.

His car is found abandoned at a truck stop.

And like, nobody in town ever saw him again.

So this like totally totally feeds into the panic at the time, as you can imagine.

But then there's this amazing article in the Colorado Independent where the reporter just sort of like finds him in the like 2000s and sort of like finds his son because I think he's maybe died by now.

But like, the guy just like he had already left one family, assumed a new identity, you know, like when he came to Colorado, and then left Colorado to like start a new family in Texas.

He just, He just sort of like had a habit of like bopping from town to town, changing his name and starting a new family, which he would then like go on to do again.

But he also wrote like a really, apparently like this book that actually has been recommended to me as like a good piece of journalism about like Texas police cover-ups and like narcotics investigations.

Wow.

In the 80s.

Really interesting person.

Then he like decamps for Mexico where he has like maybe like a fraudulent university.

Well, you know, who among us?

Um, which is like the last we've heard of him.

What is this guy's name or names?

Dane Edwards is the is his like when he's doing uh mutilation stuff.

This is kind of the heart of the research experience is you're like you set out trying to learn about one thing and then you're like, wait, he did what?

He did what after that?

Like

you run into like human drama in a beautiful way.

Exactly.

The beauty of the con man is like the constant reinvention and it seems like he was a good name for that.

And like classic leaving a family to start a new one behavior to kind of leave it open to implication that it might have been aliens.

Right.

It was either aliens or like you got too close to the truth.

Yes.

Can I bring you on the satanic panic link to the cow mutilation?

Oh my God.

Always, yes.

You know, like, of course, this is the 70s.

So it's like we're a little early for peak satanic panic.

Probably, I feel like that would have become the dominant explanation if it was like a few years later.

The timing was a little off, but of course, there was like a satanic theory.

It often begins with like a very credulous cop.

Yeah.

The role that like hyper-credulous cops have played in spreading conspiracies is like really kind of alarming.

Yeah.

So this begins, this is like the credulous cop here is an ATF investigator in Minnesota, and he gets contacted by a guy in prison for bank robbery.

And he says that he has evidence that there is

the cow mutilations are the responsibility of a quote hell-oriented biker gang.

Oh, which sounds cool.

Then they are traveling the country mutilating cows with the ultimate goal of creating hell on earth.

Oh.

But you start with cows.

You start with cows, exactly.

Hell-oriented makes it sound like they are eventually going to hell, hell, but are taking the long way.

I mean, I guess that's their plan.

Yeah, okay, why not?

Yeah, love it.

Do you want to guess what the name of the cult is?

Wait, I need to think of a pun.

Hell steak.

Oh, that's too good, unfortunately.

It's called the occult.

That's really great.

They own a lot of bookstores.

Really weird.

Really real, right?

And do you want to guess the name of the leader of the occult?

Yes.

Lucifer Satan.

His name is Howard, apparently.

That's better.

That's much better.

Howard?

Oh, isn't your mother worried?

So, you know, this guy in prison is like feeding the ATF investigator all of these stories.

And the ATF investigator gets so invested that he's, you know, put, he's like, you know boss I need to be put on this case full-time

and then of course this like starts leaking to the press

and then the press is like you know writing these articles they start quoting Michael Warnke your your old buddy oh my gosh Mike Warnke the satanic priest yeah yeah he uh god when I think of Mike Warnke who wrote the wonderful made-up memoir The Satan Seller about becoming a satanic high priest, I think about him going to this satanic meeting in a fancy house in, I think, Redlands, California, where they had hot canopies.

And I love the idea that you're like trying to convey that Satanists are really sophisticated and impressive.

And you're like, they had hot canopes.

Live in fear.

You must live in fear.

You got to make hot canopes, Howard.

You got to up your game.

How's your kitchen set up?

So the Satan seller came out in 72, and this is all like 73, 74.

So it's really, you know, like we're like on the, the topic is like starting to trend.

So it feels to me like a Scheherazade kind of situation.

Like the bank robber is just like spinning out his eyes.

He's like, and the cult is

involved in trying to steal plutonium.

Like somehow plutonium gets involved.

It is Scheherazade.

And it's also Henry Lee Lucas, who's also Scheherazade.

Yes, exactly.

Exactly.

Like just the more elaborate you can make the story, the more you can get whatever privileges that come from being like a special informant.

And you're like, oh, dear husband, tomorrow I will tell you the story of how the Satanists put a cow into a limousine and drove it all the way to the White House.

Right, exactly.

We can't, not, there's not enough time today, but tomorrow, come back, meet me here tomorrow.

Bring me a strawberry milkshake and I'll tell you all about it.

Well, so actually, so this guy.

His scheme seems to have been like, he was like, oh, you know, my buddy in Texas, who's also in prison, he knows a lot about this gang too.

And that guy also, also, you know, was like Scheherazading, this ATF investigator.

Both of these informants were like, oh, we live in fear of the occult.

Like, we need to be transferred to smaller, you know, less high-security prisons.

They both get their transfers to separate prisons.

They both separately escape from prison, but then I believe are like later captured.

You know what?

I really respect that.

And I, you know, if you

question the usefulness of prison as a concept at all, you have to just cheer on anyone who sees a cultural wave and seizes an idiot who crosses their path.

Good for them.

Exactly.

Getting out of prison for being a good storyteller, you know, I'm not mad at it.

Yeah.

There was also a novel from 1979 called Jay's Journal, which is the clear, like, go ask Alice rip-off.

Well, and I know that that was written.

that was written by the lady who wrote Go Ask Alice.

I'm just gonna rip, yeah, she just ripped herself off 40 or 50 times.

Wow.

Jay is apparently, I haven't read it, but from the online description that I read, is a teenager who is enticed into new age meditation practices by a satanic recruiter.

Not meditation.

I know.

You know what the Satanists love?

Meditation.

And then he, like the scene he gets involved in, they

like feed drugs to cows or maybe inject the cows with drugs, then mutilate the cows and then bathe in and drink their blood.

And so this is this is sort of like part of the hypothetical satanic hypothesis.

And that's like, what are they actually doing with these cows?

And once that book comes out, you start seeing this pop up, you know, like the kind of novel to newspaper pathway.

Yeah.

Stephen King, the star of the hour,

his first book, Carrie, involves animal blood to a significant extent.

Carrie gets pig blood dumped on her at the prom, iconically.

And

because he's a guy from small town, Maine, when he asked to solve the question of where do you get blood, he's like, oh, you know, you can sneak onto a farm and figure it out, do it,

drive to the farm, and then walk up to the barn and just like do it yourself.

Just, yeah, get some blood.

Come on.

It's not complicated.

Just like send your boyfriend John Travolta to do it.

Also,

the uncomfortable question that, like, if you need animal blood or cow blood or whatever, just like go to a bookshelf.

Yeah, it seems the simpler way.

But, you know, I respect these kids with their DIY, you know,

trying to get it themselves.

Yeah.

The backstory to Jay's Colonel is really interesting, and it's covered in a book called Unmask Alice, which is written by Portland's own Rick Emerson, who we had on last year.

And

the part of the story with Jay's journal is that Beatrice Sparks,

the nice lady who helped publish Go Ask Alice, by which, of course, I mean she wrote it, did take like significant portions of an actual teenager's journal and life and then

added in all the Satan, cow mutilation, over-the-top fear-mongering Mormon stuff.

And so, not only, it's both fake and

like harmful to the memory of an actual kid at the same time.

Oh my God, what a night.

That's like such a nightmare.

Yeah.

Writers are the worst, it turns out.

Yes.

That's scarier than cowblood.

But both the kind of like black helicopter government and the satanic cult theories sort of fade away

by 1980.

And also 1980 is like when it the phenomenon stops being reported so much

but that's also when it kind of becomes it sort of like leaps into legend so you're seeing like fewer

if any like cases of it but it's like more and more associated with ufos and aliens which i feel like is the dominant explanation now which is like it just feels like going to target simply to get some gum you know wait what do you mean like like like are the aliens coming to mutilate the cattle or is this simply one thing on a long list of stuff they're trying to accomplish on this trip to our planet?

Well, there's like a, there was, like, definitely like a lot of fear of like cows first and like, who's next?

What is next?

Right.

The best explanation that I heard, and like, the real like kind of originator of the

UFO theory and like what spread it the most was this incredible documentary that I watched yesterday called A Strange Harvest.

I had heard that it won a regional Emmy and I was like, that's so silly.

And then I watched it and I was like, give this woman an Emmy.

It's good.

The 1970s aesthetic is incredible.

It's like all these kind of ranchers, you know, like wearing these beautiful outfits with gorgeous cars, you know, like walking through a field.

And Linda Moulton Howe is the journalist and she's like, well, sir, you know, like, if it wasn't the government and it wasn't a cult, you know, then who was it?

And the rancher will kind of like crouch down with like a piece of straw in his mouth and be like, well, well, ma'am, I don't rightly know who or what it was.

You know, it's so good.

There's like a long scene of like a long sort of hypnosis scene by this guy who was like another like early kind of UFO

abduction guy named Dr.

Leo Sprinkle, who I'm obsessed with now.

Leo Sprinkle.

But

she's really like spreading this hypothesis of it was the aliens.

And her thing, she was like a respected journalist for, I forget, like CBS or something in Denver.

And all of her previous documentaries had been about like pollution and basically like the government covering up, you know, like toxic chemicals in the water, like legitimate stuff.

She's, she doesn't make a huge point of it, but like the hypothesis is like the aliens are taking the cows because they want to test like samples to measure how how pollution is impacting us, which I think is sort of like a sweet theory.

It's like an Earth Day cow mutilation crossover or something.

I think I really believe in

our aliens ourselves, right?

Like the things that we theorize the aliens doing, I think, really reveal a lot about our hopes and fears and dreams and are like a good way of knowing ourselves.

Yeah, exactly.

And so, in some ways, like they can be the kind of malevolent force,

but they can also be these like higher, higher beings that like see more or know more and, you know, like know that we're killing the planet and are coming to warn us or whatever by like through the strange mechanism of cutting out the odders of cows.

Right.

Because like it's, you know, I mean, they could leave a note.

You know, you're free to leave a note at literally any time.

Exactly.

But that kind of like fades away too.

I think that the cow mutilation kind of gives gives way to the like

alien abduction craze of the 80s you know people start being like

they didn't take my cows they took me but you can sort of see it leading into that and also i mean i think the reason one of the reasons it like fades out as a phenomenon for a while is there were a lot of investigations on the investigations for the most part were like these things that that sound really scary are actually like very explicable like the idea that

why are the tongue and the eye and the ear is gone well like well that's the soft tissue that tends to be like but actually very commonly the first thing that the predators will eat and the udders too the testicles or whatever like that's that's actually like quite normal that that's where a predator would start sometimes like you'll see these animals will have like half of like the lower half of the jaw like on or snippy had had more extensive than that but like it'll start with part of the face being gone but like you know these cows, when they die, like their

tongues will be sticking out, and so the predation will kind of start at the tongue and like work its way back.

A lot of times you'll have things like the guy, Rommel, who is like the FBI agent that I was mentioning who had investigated a bunch of these.

He says like, oh, you know, in photographs, the edge of a wound might look, you know, surgically precise.

But if you're actually there, like some of that is like a trick of photography, right?

Like, especially when you, you know, if you're thinking, like, it's like, I caught a fish and it was this big, right?

Like, grainy 1970s imagery, like something that looks sharp in a photo from a distance when you're actually up close.

Like, he would be like, Yeah, no, you could see the tooth marks.

People often are thinking, like, this doesn't look like the work of a scavenger.

And they're thinking, you know, like a mountain lion or some coyote.

But the scavengers, like, there are many smaller scavengers.

Like, you were mentioning like maggots and ants and magpies and like all of and flies and stuff the sort of like smaller scavengers that make you know much smaller like the wounds that they inflict are smaller you know don't have the kind of like clawing appearance that like a coyote would but you know they're definitely predators too

like one of the things that you hear a lot in the cow mutilation stuff is like oh there there was no blood there was no blood but the explanation for that that seems like pretty that makes a lot of sense is like it's the predators aren't killing them.

They're dying from a disease.

Maybe they're dying from a lightning strike.

Maybe they like ate some barbed wire.

They're so they're not bleeding as they're dying.

It's not that kind of death.

And then once they're kind of sitting in the field for a couple of days, like the blood pools in the lower extremities, like that's quite normal.

And so there's not, you know, a lot of blood at these like places where the magpies and the bugs are nibbling on them.

That's just like what happens after a few days.

So again, like all of these things that are like the normal, normal predation decay, like what happens to a carcass in a field for a while, like most of us like don't see that a lot.

And so it sounds, when you sort of describe it, it sounds horrific, but a lot about it is like really just sort of like the normal horror of everyday nature.

Right.

And yeah, and the normal horror of everyday nature, you know, and then there's, I mean, nature also gives us so much information, right?

There's so much data.

Like you said, like if you are in a certain frame of mind or if you're building a theory, then there's just always going to be something to find suspicious, I think.

And I think there's also

something about animals that, particularly, like, if you live life close to animals, it is such a strange relationship because you feel very close to them and you feel like you can communicate, but then there's this huge gulf of communication, you know, where you're just sort of like, what is actually happening to you?

Like, every time my cats have been sick, you know, I'm just like,

just talk to me.

Like, tell me what's up, you know, know, like, why can't we just like have a conversation?

But there's, there's, there's like something about, you know, the animal behavior like around death that I think is like really confusing and distressing, like because we don't understand it.

And there's probably some way that we like never will.

Right, right.

And we don't understand each other's behavior.

Just thinking about like, you know, well, crows have funerals and humans have funerals and we can see each other's funerals and be like, yeah, that's a funeral.

But, you know, they fulfill different needs for us, and we have different, different ideas about it, I'm sure.

Yeah.

Crows don't dig a little hole.

Maybe they look at us and are like, that's interesting.

They dug a little hole.

Yeah.

What are they trying to hide?

And so, yeah, like for a long time, the mute phenomenon was really like you would have maybe some intermittent reports here and there, but I do kind of think that the like recent resurgence, which is like nowhere near on the scale of what it was in the 70s, I do wonder if some of it is because of Facebook.

You know, like the mute phenomenon dies out, like, as the small local newspaper dies out, you know, maybe people are seeing like weird-looking carcasses in their fields, but like, who do you tell?

You know, like, if it's 2007, there's no one to tell, really.

But then 10 years later, you know,

you can post about it online, and then the stories start to circulate again.

And we have like social media algorithms that I imagine are pretty attuned to scary stories and conspiracy theories.

Yeah, totally.

It's notable to me that

a number of the recent cases of mutilation that have gotten a lot of attention have been in eastern Oregon, like a lot of them

near where the Bundies, like when they occupied the government building, like in that area.

So this is obviously like a place with a lot of conflict over, you know, cows and the use of federal land and what the government can and can't tell you what to do.

So

it is this funny way where, like, everything old is new again.

Yeah.

And I mean, do you think that that's what's happening?

That to quote Carly Simon, it's coming around again?

I mean, I think these stories are also like really useful.

And you see that from somebody like Tucker Carlson, who did a cow mutilation

special on his like Fox News show or whatever.

Not on like the main Fox News, but on the thing where you had to like do a special subscription to watch it, which I did,

which I do feel like is a little heroic on my part.

It really is.

Yeah.

We got to have a little parade for you.

Yeah.

But I have to say, it's like the Tucker Carlson thing.

It's super gory.

There's like

an extended scene where they're like butchering a cow.

Wow.

Kind of for like no particular reason, you know, just to like have a bunch of like images of like blood and cow

viscera just to wig people out to make the argument stronger exactly.

It's just sort of to like create this feeling of like

horror and disgust.

Um, he doesn't really like come down on a, you know, was it the government, was it UFOs, was it the Satanists?

He's he's just a little bit like, I don't know, some say like there's it's the woke mind virus.

But I do think like that that feeling of just sort of like ambient paranoia, you know, like they are targeting us.

It's in some ways like the they seems to matter less than like the feeling of being targeted.

I'm at risk.

My rural lifestyle is under threat by some shadowy force.

It doesn't even really matter who.

I'm at risk.

You know, you should worry about my vulnerability.

This is probably something that isn't happening to a different extent than before, but just the sort of the things we're thinking about and the way information sharing works is favoring it.

And I guess what that means is that whoever's doing it now was the same entity doing it in the 70s.

So you can believe that it's kind of a natural process and is

bugs and foxes and stuff, or you can believe that it's still aliens.

So that's nice.

Choose your own culprit.

I was also reading about some non-mute

cow conspiracies.

Apparently, a bunch of cows dying for reasons associated with this, like just wild drought that we have here in Texas and other parts of the country.

And there's like a big TikTok conspiracy that it's actually like the Biden government is killing off cows because they want us to all get used to eating bugs.

Oh, it's again, it's like the federal government is attacking the beef industry, like they don't want you eating beef.

It's funny because I was prepared for that to resolve a slightly credible sounding conspiracy theory where it's like they're trying to kill these cattle to like drive up beef prices or something, something that would actually benefit, you know, a group of individuals planning a crime together, like a conspiracy as opposed to like

because the idea that like, well, we have to kill off some of these cows so that people eat less meat because we're going to force everyone to eat bugs is like, is it profitable for anyone to force me to eat bugs?

Because like the conspiracies that I believe in are the ones where the motive is profit.

Because I feel like that's where it makes sense.

You know, somebody benefits, and it's usually in a boring way.

Somebody is getting paid off to destroy human life, and they're probably not even getting paid that much.

And then, where the motive is like, well, it's everyone's going to all this effort and taking all this risk to force me to be a vegetarian.

It's like, they don't care about you, they care about money.

And not just a vegetarian, a bugatarian.

But, you you know, a bugatarian.

Have you looked into like who's invested in cricket, who's invested in cricket futures?

You know, like, yeah, listen, I've had some delicious crickets in my time.

I'm ready.

I accept.

Well, the world,

the future is yours.

Along with the horse rippings, the legend of the werewolf arises from inexplicable and sort of like gross sheep deaths in France in the 16th century.

Really?

You know, it's just like animals are always like dying in these weird ways that you're just like, this is not how they usually die.

And, you know, the search for a culprit, whether it's a werewolf or like the horse ripper

or, you know, the government or an alien, it's like always the kind of the search for like somebody did it rather than just like nature's gross sometimes.

Right.

Or just, I don't know, this feeling of like that we know that we're in danger, but we can't see the people who are endangering us, like you were saying.

Like, we can't see a black helicopter in the sky that's full of, you know, the government officials who are making it harder to survive economically as a rancher or something.

And again, this is not to say that like people are stupid.

It's to say that people are people and that we're all animals and that we're...

I don't know, that there's this kind of like, you know, that like seasickness happens because like what your body feels doesn't match up with what your eyeballs see.

So it just like it feels wrong and you resolve that by feeling nauseated, which certainly helps matters.

And like, I feel like the way we have to process information is making us seasick in some way, where it's like, we can see the world around us, but like unless we work in Washington or something like that, we can't see the forces that are affecting how we live our lives and like, you know, how much money we have and how safe our family members are.

We just see like a bunch of places and people and things that have almost nothing to do with the places and the people that affect our quality of life.

And so it feels like our brains are trying to make some kind of connection between what we see and what we know.

Trying to like have it have some sort of coherence and even just trying to have like a villain that's not just like a system.

Right.

You know, a system is like a kind of a hard villain to like wrap your mind around and also kind of like an undefeatable villain.

But like a helicopter you could shoot down.

I think this idea of like we're in the rural west and we're not being listened to.

It was a phenomenon among small farmers and ranchers like in these kind of parts of the country that like didn't get a lot of attention from politicians, from the national news.

You know, like the plight of the rural farmer in southern Colorado is like

not something that would usually make it into Newsweek, but then when you have something, this veneer of possibly the occult, possible conspiracy, possible UFO, then all of a sudden people want to hear what you have to say.

So it makes sense to me that it was something that, you know, that the more energy you put into the system, the bigger it would grow.

Yeah.

What do you think is going to happen next with our cattle mutilation problem?

If we assume that like what's happening now is like a kind of like mutation of what happened in the 70s, it seems like probably

we'll see more of them cropping up and maybe they'll be like associated with other kind of uncanny phenomena is my guess.

I mean, it's interesting to me that the recent ones, the mutilations that made the New York Times, which is kind of wild.

I was amazed by that.

I think that's probably the New York Times's

understanding of virality, right?

And like what stories tend to go big.

Like maybe it was the news editors, you know, instinct for like, this is an important story, but I guess I have like a more cynical take, which is like,

they knew it would travel and it did.

Yeah.

And so we do live in a world that is like governed by the

algorithm in too many ways.

And so.

Yeah.

And that's the real black helicopter.

Truly.

Hovering over us all.

And seen.

And that was our episode.

Thank you so much to Carolyn Kendrick for editing and producing this episode and driving with us down a dark highway.

Thank you to Rachel Monroe for guesting and bringing her stories and her insight.

Thank you to you for listening.

Without you, none of this is possible.

If you want to read Rachel Monroe's writing and who wouldn't, you can find her stuff on the internet.

I hear there's a lot of good stuff on the internet.

She is at rachel-monroe.com.

That's rachel1-monroe.com.

And if you want to listen to music by Carolyn Kendrick, see more about what she's doing in the world, you can find that at carolynkendrick.com.

No dash, she got in first.

That's our episode.

We'll see you soon.