A Mystery or Madness?

Adventures of a Young Man

The radio station sat in the middle of a beet field on the High Plains of Eastern Colorado. The signal was broadcast with what engineers described as a “half-wave tower,” which meant it was very tall, and sent radio waves a great distance across the corn and wheat and beet crops flourishing on the flat lands. On the air, I referred, to our operation, partially sarcastic, as, “The Great Voice of the Great Plains.” If we had been great, a part of my workday tasks would not have involved reading the names of our small-town residents who had been admitted and dismissed from the local hospital, a report that also included the nature of their ailments.

“Believe it or not, we make a lot of money off that hospital report, Jimmy boy,” the station manager told me. “I think our population isn’t even five thousand. Everybody knows everybody and we might as well put this info on the air because it’s going to get around town anyway. This way we turn a buck on gossip.”

Mr. Mike was tall and balding, dark skin beneath his eyes, jowls that hung more from sadness, I thought, than age. He had been announcer in a large market, he claimed, but never said which one or how he ended up in the beet fields watching the wind blow dirt across the Interstate and playing “Chevy Van” on a 1000-watt day timer.

“Yeah, but what if someone gets admitted for severe hemorrhoids or gonorrhea?” I asked. “Am I supposed to put that on the air?”

“Obviously not. I’d trust you to use your better judgment.”

“I don’t know how you got the impression I have better judgment, Bossman.”

“Well, you don’t have a personality, either, if you want to know the truth,” he said. “So, stop trying to be entertaining. Just do your job.”

“Which is?”

“Time and temperature, play records, and shut up. You aren’t clever.”

Mr. Mike was certainly not anyone to criticize an announcer’s personality. His was most closely compared to a dial tone on a phone, but he was right about the damn hospital report.  

There was not much airtime for me to interject any personality into a broadcast even if I had one to share. The entire morning block was consumed with network and local news, a farm and ranch report, weather, and more weather, announcement of school lunch menus, obituaries, a swap shop, a few songs, weather again, and, finally, the mind melting Hospital Report. Community radio was always exploring new concepts for generating revenue and Mr. Mike had made the strategic business decision that there was an advertising market and audience for a daily reading of names that were on the list of admissions and dismissals from the county hospital.

Sponsors fought over the commercial time on the “Hospital Report.” I was a bit stunned that such private information was broadcast but the list of names was daily in front of me and I read it without any trace of earnestness or irony, as ordered. The patient’s health status, why they were admitted to the hospital, was also part of the information we broadcast, and I imagined citing even greater detail.

“Ol’ Joe Don Barnes was admitted to the general hospital Saturday night with a hell of an infected boil on his butt. Doctors expect to lance it Sunday, and we hope to hear Joe Don’s name on our list of dismissals Monday morning. Docs expect Joe Don to be back sitting on his ass in front of the TV and eating Cheetos by Monday afternoon. We’ll be back with a list of the day’s hospital dismissals right after this from one of our local sponsors.”

The Flat Colorado

Hitchhiking had delivered me to the “corn popper” radio station near the Kansas line. (The industry pejorative was an indication there was just enough power to heat a corn popper, not do a proper job of broadcasting to a reasonably sized audience). I had walked down the dirt road to the studio after being dropped off Interstate 70 by a trucker. The general manager, who turned out to be Mr. Mike, was not present but I left him a small reel of a morning show I did in Arizona’s White Mountains, and my mother’s phone number in the event he was interested in hiring me. When the summer ended, I called home and got a message my great talent was needed out among the pickup trucks and crop rows. The salary was $550 a month plus $25 for every high school sport for which I provided play-by-play.

My primary interest in broadcasting was always to tell stories and be a journalist. Unfortunately, I did not know what that really meant in a small town. One summer morning, while sipping coffee and listening to the 1910 Fruitgum Company sing their hit, “Chewy, Chewy,” I was imagining myself at the Khyber Pass, bravely detailing great geopolitical conflicts when the county sheriff called.

“Are you the one who does the news there?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. Who’s calling?”

“I’m the Kit Carson County Sheriff, and I got a news story you ain’t gonna believe.” He paused. “And I think I need your help.”

“Sure. What’s it about, Sheriff?”

“Just a dead cow.”

“Well, okay. That sounds interesting. Where do I meet up with you?”

I guess I had no right to think anything of importance might happen out yonder in the great wide open, but I did not think I was going to grow my nascent journalism credibility by reporting on dead cows. The directions he gave me took me to a ranch gate up in the northwest part of the county, heading toward Brush and Fort Morgan, which I considered big cities. The sheriff, who looked very much like a cowboy who had drank too much beer, was leaning against the front fender of his cruiser. We were within squinting distance of the front range of the Rocky Mountains. He wasted no time with introductions.

“Come on this way,” he said. “It ain’t but a hundred yards from this cattle guard.”

“Cows die a lot out on the plains, don’t they sheriff?”

“They sure do, son, but more of ‘em are dying this way and something ain’t right.”

 We came upon a very large animal lying on its side, motionless. I looked at the cow and then back at the sheriff and shrugged. I had my microphone out and recorder strapped over my shoulder, but I had not turned it on because I did not expect a cow to be worthy of the newscast.

“I’m not sure a dead cow is news, Sheriff. Is it?”

“Take a better look,” he said. “This keeps happening. We don’t know what to make of it but think if it’s on the news, maybe we’ll scare off whoever’s doing this.”

“Just killing cows?” I asked. “Why would someone kill cattle?”

“It’s a bit more than that. Get up there and look real close.”

The deputy pointed to the underside of the cow and there was what appeared to be a perfect circle of flesh excised from the region where the udder would have been located. I knelt and was able to look through the animal’s body. About a two-foot in diameter chunk of the cow appeared to have been removed through some sort of massive vivisection.

Typical Mutilated Corpse

“Well, that’s pretty weird,” I said. “Who the hell would do that?”

“What’s weirder is there ain’t no blood, nowhere. There’s more than ten gallons of blood in a cow that size and if you’ve ever been to a slaughterhouse, you know these animals can’t get cut any way without blood everywhere.”

“How could there be no blood?” I scanned the area where it lay. Dry pasture, dirt, no trampled growth of grass.

“You tell me.”

“And who the hell needs a cow’s udder? That’s what’s missing in that section, isn’t it?”

“We figure it’s some kind of cultists coming out from Denver, but weird thing is we never see any footprints or tire tracks or prop wash, which we would see if they were a cult that had a damn helicopter, and that don’t make much sense. We just need it on the news and hope to scare them off. We’re getting a lot of pressure from local ranchers. This is scaring people and costing them some big money.”

“Seems like me doing a broadcast is going to scare even more people, isn’t it?” I had already begun recording our conversation, though, and held the microphone in his direction when he spoke. The sheriff did not protest.

Carcass with Anus Removed

I walked around the carcass to get a complete view of the injuries. The animal had been additionally disfigured on its head and rear. One eye was missing, though there was no damage to tissue around the socket, and a section of muscle along the jaw line had been cut off with what had to have been a very sharp, precision instrument to expose the teeth. I leaned over, a bit baffled why anyone would remove tissue as obscure as the flesh around the mouth and teeth, but only on one side.

“The tail’s gone, too,” he said. “But that ain’t all. Come here.”

He stepped to the rear and pointed. The anus appeared to have been cored out somehow and the tail was missing from the rear bone structure. None of it made any sense.

“Jesus. I just don’t get it.”

“Yeah, I know. Nobody around here does. No idea. When we see the males killed like this, the penis and scrotum are removed along with the tail and anus. I’m sick of looking at it. Makes us think it’s a sex cult of some kind. But we get no clues and no idea how to stop this.”

“No suspects?”

“Not a damned one. We’ve had a few ranchers tell us they’ve seen lights the night before in the area where the animals are found, but there are never any tracks of any kind even when it’s been wet. Some of them say they see lights in the sky so that’s what got us to thinking about helicopters but no prop wash ever or marks where landing skids would’ve touched down or any sign the animals were dragged. And never a damned footprint.”

“Pretty sophisticated for a cult, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, but what the hell else could it be? And here’s another durned thing we can’t figure. No critters come around to eat the body. In this country, an animal goes down, and it ain’t but a few hours before coyotes or wolves or whatever comes around and starts pulling at the soft flesh to eat it. Nothing comes near these carcasses. We can come out here in two weeks and it’ll just lying here dried up and untouched by predators. Seen dozens of ‘em that way.”

Not What Predators Do

I moved away for a wider look at the scene, hoping to see something the sheriff might have missed. A drop of blood, a footprint, anything that might signify human presence but there was nothing after I encircled the body with an expanding radius. Blood ought to have been everywhere on the ground. When I got down on my hands and knees to get a tighter view where the flesh had been cut, there did not even appear to be blood in the cells of the remaining tissue. It was white.

We recorded an interview and I cut excerpts into a long news piece I ran the next morning. The phone rang all day from people with theories ranging from UFOs to vampire cults. Several people said they had lost animals to the strange mutilations but had not reported the incidences to the police for fear of being ridiculed. Not a single lead was ever established to help solve the cattle country mystery in Eastern Colorado during the seventies.

Between April and October of 1975, a time that coincided with when I was a young radio reporter, more than 200 cattle mutilations were reported in Colorado. Four years later, the number had risen to thousands in one calendar year, and the FBI opened an investigation, which, ultimately concluded they were natural deaths or caused by predators. I could not understand the conclusion based upon what I had witnessed, and I never heard of a rancher accepting the agency’s findings.

The modern wave of these strange occurrences began in the 1970s and spread from west of the Mississippi River through the Intermountain West. Ranchers often blamed the government for conducting biological experiments because unmarked helicopters were frequently seen near where the cattle had fallen. The antipathy between ranchers and the government became so great that the Nebraska National Guard issued orders for its helicopters to fly at 2000 feet for training exercises instead of the normal 1000 feet because cattle raisers had taken to shooting at helicopters over their land.

The phenomenon has not abated. In 2021, a series of unexplained cattle deaths and mutilations enraged ranchers in Oregon. Sex organs, tongues, eyes, and other body parts were removed with what one witness described as “surgical-like precision.” Never has blood been found at any scene. The prosaic explanation for the mystery is that the animals are dying of natural causes and predation, blowflies, and decomposing flesh are supposed to be an accepted solution to what appears to be the act of an intelligent creature that might have committed the mutilations. Ranchers are quick to point out they have seen many animals that are victims of predation, and the flesh is almost universally torn and ragged, not cut with straight edges.

Stanford educated researcher and journalist Linda Moulton Howe began investigating the mutilation mystery as a reporter for a Denver television station in 1979. She was initially intrigued by the 1967 case of a horse named, “Lady,” which had been partly skinned and had its lungs, heart, brain, and thyroid carefully excised. There was no blood, and a Geiger counter recorded radioactivity around the carcass and in an area of flattened long grass not far from where the animal had been found.

No trace of human involvement was ever discovered, and a county judge said less than 24 hours later he and his wife witnessed three orange objects flying in formation over the county. Two deputy sheriffs, who insisted they were followed in their car by an orange ball, were threatened with their jobs if they spoke publicly about what they witnessed. Howe, after spending decades investigating the phenomenon and examining a few thousand dead animals, has zero doubt that cattle mutilations and mysterious human abductions are being performed by alien life forms.

A few weeks after my report had been broadcast on the Intermountain Radio Network, I received a call from a rancher down in Rocky Ford. He urged me to come down and see a cow’s carcass on his ranch, which he said he had found a day earlier about fifty feet up in the crook of branches on a cottonwood tree. He admitted to being scared and had seen lights over his herd several times the previous night. I was very curious about the cow in the tree, but I decided not to go.

I’m glad I didn’t. There are some things I’m not sure I want to know.