Years of cattle mutilations at one ranch

[Magical Realist]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYxhMhhXo7Y

First 4:05 minutes...

[Magical Realist]

More details:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw9Qst194A8

[C C]

Didn't realize that a precursor for this goes all the way back to the "mystery airship" yellow journalism of the 19th-century. Amazing how the latter fad propagated across isolated towns and rural areas of the country via newspapers and magazines alone -- no radio, television, cinema, etc.

I'd never heard of the fictional character Frank Reade, who created flying machines and robots -- even providing the inspiration for one of Jules Verne's novels. Young farm boys read the Frank Reade stories and grew up to project that nostalgic imagination onto their own local countryside properties in the late 1890s.

https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4456

EXCERPT: Belief in extraterrestrials as the cause of mutilations goes back to the 1960s, though true believers will often claim that the phenomenon has been going on for longer than that. As evidence, they may cite a widely circulated story reported in April 1897, where a strange flying object was caught in the act of cattle-napping in Kansas. The witness to the incident, one Alexander Hamilton, described a cigar-shaped craft with a carriage underneath with "six of the strangest beings I ever saw" inside. As he watched,

It seemed to pause and hover directly over a two-year old heifer, which was bawling and jumping, apparently fast in the fence. Going to her, we found a cable about a half-inch in thickness made of some red material, fastened in a slip knot around her neck, one end passing up to the vessel, and the heifer tangled in the wire fence. We tried to get it off but could not, so we cut the wire loose and stood in amazement to see the ship, heifer and all, rise, slowly, disappearing in the northwest. Neighbor Thomas Link (four miles away) found the hide, legs, and head in his field the next day and no tracks in the soft ground.

[...] This story was told by another Alexander Hamilton, who was a farmer, a businessman ... and also a liar. The entire cow-napping story was an admitted hoax, part of the 1897 Mystery Airship flap, probably itself worthy of a future Skeptoid episode. The important point here is that Hamilton's story is part of a made-up series of newsworthy events perpetuated by inventive reporters at a time when journalism standards were not what they are today. Only its superficial resemblance to modern cattle mutilation tales keep it alive in believer circles.

Researcher Bill Ellis places the first occurrence of "modern" cattle mutilation in England in the early 20th century, where mutilated cattle led to fears that a wolf was on the prowl. Over the course of the century, mutilations were attributed to various evil agents, including Satanists, hippies, and lunatics, before becoming attached to extraterrestrials in the 1960s.

The scare reached its height in the 1970s and 1980s, when several law enforcement and scientific investigations were launched to determine the cause of the phenomenon. The FBI was even compelled to investigate. Their investigation amounted to little more than collections of newspaper clippings because of jurisdictional issues, but they concluded that nothing seemed to be amiss in the deaths other than natural causes. This was a conclusion shared by other investigations.

In 1979, Sheriff Herb Marshall of Washington County, Arkansas, took a different approach when dealing with a flap of cattle mutilation reports in his jurisdiction. He obtained a fresh cow corpse and put it out in a field in conditions like the ones so-called mutilations were being found in.

The corpse was watched for 48 hours straight. No aliens came for the corpse, nor did big predators; instead, the sheriff and his officers observed as a combination of bloating and blowflies went to work. Expanding gases split the stomach and exposed the internal organs; blowflies feasted on the organs and laid eggs in the soft-exposed tissues of eyes, lips, and anuses; and the resulting maggots devoured the soft tissues down to the bone.

These flies can hatch in as little as ten hours, and the larvae can mature in as little as two days. The result was a carcass that matched the common mutilation story, all from natural causes. For Sheriff Marshall, that was case-closed on the mutilations in his area.

[Magical Realist]

Cattle die of natural causes, they decompose by natural methods, and sometimes they are scavenged in such a way that they look, to those not used to seeing dead things, as though they had been vivisected.

That's the thing though. These corpses are seen by ranchers themselves who are very used to seeing dead things. There must be a reason these particular ones stand out as different from them. It's not just your run of the mill usual cow taken down by predators.