05x03 - Mysterious Mutilations

[bunniefuu]

[unsettling music playing]

[man 1] There is fear these days,

fear of a modern-day Jack the Ripper,
whose victims are not people,

but livestock, who mutilates them,

cutting out an ear or tongue or heart
or sex organ with such surgical precision,

investigators can't tell
what instrument was used.

The cattle were being k*lled
in mysterious ways.

No struggle. No tracks.

Her tongue was removed.
What are they doing with her tongue?

[man 2] Witnesses claimed
UFOs, satanic cults,

-and secret government experiments...
-[Geiger counter clicking]

...were linked to some of the mutilations.

A Missouri farm couple claimed

they witnessed
a spacecraft land in a pasture

and aliens operating on a cow.

There's no rhyme or reason for it,
why somebody would do that to a cow.

[cow snorts]

[opening theme music playing]

[eerie music playing]

[bluegrass music playing]

[man] I've been ranching
in the cow business

since I got out of school, so 25 years.

It's a hard way to make a living,
but I like the freedom, you know?

We live in a really remote spot.

Not a lot of people around here,
and we like it that way.

I think the first time
that I ever heard about cattle mutilations

was way back in high school or something.

When you hear that kinda stuff,
you just... you kinda... just write it off.

You don't really believe it.

You just don't think
that's gonna really happen to us.

It was early June of 2021.

[brooding music playing]

[Anderson] We had the heifer.

She wasn't acting right,

and we trailed her two miles,

but she was acting odd.

As they were gathering h*ifers,
she was falling to the back,

and she was the last one through the gate.

So I figured we'd go check on her
in a day or two and see what's going on.

Next morning, I got in the pickup,

drove over the hill
to that part of the ranch

to go look at the heifer.

[unsettling music playing]

[Anderson] That heifer
was laying right up here

dead and mutilated.

And literally right here...

in the middle
of where this green patch is...

In fact,
there's still a few bones in here.

The heifer was laying right here
on her right side,

and her face was skinned back,

her tongue was removed,

and she had a large straight cut,

probably a couple feet
right behind her shoulder here,

and the hide was pulled back.

I was taken aback.

I'd never seen anything like that ever.

There was zero tracks anywhere.

There was no noticeable blood
anywhere around the animal,

and no sign of a struggle.

Another thing,
so often, if you find something dead,

I mean, unless you're on it
in the first few hours,

usually some scavengers,

you know, crows, ravens, magpies,
coyotes, vultures, have been on him.

But this heifer that was mutilated,
nothing would eat her.

Nothing wanted to touch her.

And it just got the wheels turning
a little bit,

like maybe she'd been darted or something.

I don't know
what kind of drug or whatever else

you maybe would have to have in that dart,
but that heifer was acting strange.

[music fades]

[Anderson] One of the most troubling
things about that mutilation

is where it happened.

I mean,
this is nowhere that's easy to get to.

We take those cattle
three miles across the ranch,

through canyons,
over ridges, everything else.

How did anybody even know
there were gonna be cattle there that day?

-Nobody knew that.
-[eerie music playing]

[Anderson] So did they follow our cowboys?

That was strange.

We know she was alive
at 12:30 in the afternoon,

and we know she was dead
at six o'clock the next morning.

And what happened in between, I...

I don't know.

It was odd enough
that I called our county sheriff.

They performed their investigation
and called me that evening

and said, "We've determined
that that heifer was k*lled by a bear."

And I said, "A bear?"

Uh, I mean, we've never... we've never had
anything k*lled by a bear, ever.

We do have bears around here,
but it was this almost-surgical cut

for... I mean, it's like a two-foot cut

and in a perfectly straight line
right behind their shoulder.

Bears, last I checked, don't pack knives.

[menacing music playing]

[music fades]

My name's Mat Carter.
I'm a rancher in Eastern Oregon.

The first time
I heard about cattle mutilations

was from an old friend of mine
who had told me that he'd heard about 'em

even back in the '70s.

And I thought,

"That's kind of odd,
but... not too worried about it."

[unsettling music playing]

[Carter] Then, in August of 2020,

I went down
to the south side of the ranch,

and I saw this cow
laying over by a water trough,

and just, from afar,
it didn't look natural.

Right here is where that cow
was dead and mutilated.

Her upper lip was cut off,
and her tongue was gone,

and her intestines
were sticking out between her hind legs.

The scene was odd

because there were no signs
of any struggle of any sort.

When I was sure myself
that it was a mutilated cow,

I thought,

"Well, it's pretty close to home now.
It's happened to me,"

which you never think
it's going to, you know, until it does.

In the winter of 2022,
we had another mutilation.

It was just less than
a half mile from the house.

That bull was dead right here.
No sign of struggle or anything.

There was next to no blood
on the ground here.

No sign of foul play
other than it was mutilated.

At the scene of the crime,

we had probably
over two feet of snow on the ground then.

I looked for tracks.

You know, I walked out in the snow
all the way around,

couldn't see any tracks of any sort.

There was no way
anybody coulda got in here

without leaving tracks.

I called the state police,
and they came out,

walked around out there,
made a big circle out around,

and they didn't find any tracks.

None of the authorities I talked to

ever thought it was any kind
of a predator attack or k*ll.

Um...

They wouldn't say what it was
'cause there's no evidence.

It was just really odd.

[mysterious music playing]

My name is Jeremiah Holmes.

I work
for the Wheeler County Sheriff's Office.

We've had five confirmed mutilations
in the county since 2019.

One of them was in July of 2020.

I got a phone call from a rancher.

He was baffled by what he saw,

much like most people are.

He didn't want people to think
he was weird or strange or something

for calling it in.

There was a cow
laying underneath a juniper tree,

and her head
was five, six inches off the ground.

From a distance,

she looked like
she was probably a sick cow.

And we get up there, and she's dead.

Tongue was gone.

The reproductive tracts
that they could get to were gone.

It was eerie.

I have never seen a cow
with its head off the ground

in a rigor-mortis type stage
like that, ever.

I took a few photos and wrote it up

and, uh, documented it as well.

But I... I have no way to explain it.

I'm absolutely convinced
it's not predators.

Predators are gonna go to the soft tissue,

but they're not gonna do it
with precision.

And so, when you start
talking about mutilations,

it's a mystery.

It's that invasion
of somebody coming and k*lling an animal

on your property,

and you can't put a finger on who it is.

You're just kind of on edge
'cause you don't have a clue, really,

what you're dealing with.

[tense music playing]

My name is Stephen Allen.

I am the publisher and editor
of The Times-Journal newspaper

here in Condon, Oregon.

When I heard about the first cattle
mutilated in Wheeler County

in December of 2019,

honestly, I didn't know what to think.

I'm not a cattle guy,

but it was really when I first talked
to Deputy Jeremiah Holmes

that I started to feel like
something was going on here,

that something was happening
to the livestock in the area.

There were some people who were scared,

and people
who I think normally aren't scared.

They were shook, and they told me,

"Don't stop. Keep asking questions.
Find out what's going on."

[unsettling music playing]

[eagle cries]

[man] It was March 22nd, 2020.

My grandson and I went out.
It was the last week of elk season.

And I drove up on this bull.

Bull was laying on his side.

He just, poof, he was over.

Hadn't moved, which...
that was immediately strange.

Big chunk of skin removed from his belly
all the way back up to his rectum.

I've seen a lotta stuff.
I never seen anything like it.

Really haven't.

There's just something really strange
about the whole deal.

When I really started looking
at the situation,

the creeps kinda got to me.

Still, my hair'll stand up
on the back of my neck

when I drive by that spot.

[eerie music playing]

[man] The first time I heard
about a cattle mutilation

was in the late '70s.

My dad worked
for the Department of Agriculture.

I can remember Dad talking about 'em.

Everybody was, "Oh sh*t. What happened?"

You know, I mean, it was a big deal.

I can remember him scratching his head

and wanting to know
why somebody would do that to a cow.

The first one that I found
was really something.

[unsettling music playing]

[Hodges] I'd seen her laying there,
so when I walked up there

and I just kinda stood there in shock
'cause she was mutilated.

Actually couldn't believe it.
First one I'd actually seen.

There's no reason she should be dead.
She was a perfectly healthy cow.

They had taken her lips and her tongue,
her cheeks.

The vulva was cut out of her
in a perfect circle,

straight lines, no jagged, ragged.

I mean, just to a T.

I thought,
"Jesus Christ, what the hell happened?"

And the more you look at it,

the more bizarre it comes, and...
because it's so precise.

In the cow business,

there's absolutely no way
to prevent death.

You're gonna have some death loss,
whether sickness, a broken leg.

But mutilation, that's different.

That's some sick, twisted stuff.

[woman] My name is Julie Sperry.

I am a veterinarian
based out of Gardner, Colorado.

As a bovine veterinarian,

I work with cattle ranchers

to keep all of the cows,
calves, and bulls healthy.

-[softly] You're all right.
-[horse whinnies]

[Sperry] When I had seen reports
of cattle mutilation on the news before,

I had at first pooh-poohed it
because the genitalia and the rectums

is kind of
a predatory-scavenger type thing,

but then you add in the tongue,
and predators won't touch that.

I got to thinking
that maybe there really was something

to the cattle mutilations,
and that it wasn't predators.

This past spring,

got a phone call
about a cow that had died,

and the owner wanted
a necropsy done to see why she died

because she was a young, healthy cow.

There was really nothing that pointed
to any reason why this cow died.

After I had looked
in her abdomen and chest,

I went to grab for her tongue
so I could open her mouth better.

It's easy to use that for leverage.

And there wasn't much tongue left.

There was no way
any predator could have gotten in there

to get to it because rigor had set in,
and her jaw was clamped shut.

All of my medical training
cannot point to why this cow died.

And no amount of research, tissue, blood

is going to tell us anything
other than what I saw with my naked eye,

which was nothing.

As far as what or who
are mutilating these cows,

I honestly have no idea

because it's like nothing
that I have ever seen before.

I really wish I had an answer.

[unsettling music playing]

[man] My name's Christopher O'Brien.

I've been
a unexplained-livestock-death investigator

for over 30 years.

And I've investigated over 200 cases.

It's horrifying what I've seen.

The cattle-mutilation mystery
is by far the scariest phenomenon,

and very, very few people
take it upon themselves

to investigate cases of this type.

Okay. This is
a pretty precise triangular cut.

That cut does look a little suspect.

Okay, we see
obvious cookie-cutter incisions.

I mean, phenomenal.

Go ahead, tell me that coyotes did that.

We have cases for mutilating livestock
that have been documented

to go back to the reign of James I
in England in 1606.

But all these prior cases

really did not gain
any sort of international notoriety.

These were all local... curiosities.

But when Snippy happened in 1967,

this became an international news story.

Snippy was a horse
living in the San Luis Valley in Colorado.

And she was found dead.

The spinal cord was missing
from within the spine

with no apparent way
into the spinal-cord channel

from either the top or the bottom.

The brain was gone
without a break into the cranium,

and the upper respiratory organs
were gone.

The family, of course,
was very freaked out by this.

[woman] Laying on its side,

like it had just dropped over
while it was running,

except for the fact that from here up,

all of the skin, tissue, everything,
was stripped from that horse's head.

[O'Brien] The Snippy crime scene
was highly unusual.

Normally, if a horse is found
denuded of flesh

from its shoulders to its neck,

you'd have tissue and blood
and body fluids around,

and none of this was present at the site.

When they did a really intensive survey
of the area there,

they found that she had
pranced around in two or three circles

before then being found a hundred feet
away from where her tracks were.

That gave the appearance that maybe
something aerial had been stalking her.

[eerie music playing]

[Lobato] My mother turned around to me,
and she said,

"Nellie's horse got k*lled
by a flying saucer last night."

[O'Brien] We do have
a well-documented wave of UFO activity

that was going on
at the time of the Snippy case,

the late summer, fall of 1967.

You have a bunch of sightings
that are occurring in Colorado.

People lining up the roadways
with picnic lunches

waiting for the UFOs to come out.

I mean, it was a big deal.

And then to have the Snippy case occur,

it's almost impossible
not to equate one with the other.

And from then on,

the mutilations jumped into high gear.

In 1973, all hell broke loose.

Mutilations occurred,
and by the end of the year,

I think it was 14 states at that point
that had reported mutilation cases.

[man] Three dead cows
lying in a straight line, 150 yards apart,

their eyes, tongues, and sex organs
cut out with laser-like precision.

New Mexico was one of the states
that was really hit the hardest.

And there was over 150, I think,

mutilations in a four- or five-year period
in the late '70s.

[unsettling music playing]

[O'Brien] And by this point,

thousands of animals
had been reported mutilated.

I think a number
that's commonly used and referred to is,

in the United States and Canada,

there have been about 10,000 cases.

We're probably only seeing
the tip of the iceberg.

Probably many more cases occurred.

My personal feeling
is only one in ten mutilations

actually get reported to law enforcement.

Ranchers are typically
pretty private people.

They also take their work very seriously.

So, when they start to lose animals,
it's also a bit of a source of pride.

I don't think
they like a lot of people knowing

that they've had a death in their herd.

So you don't know
how many are not reported.

[O'Brien] A classic mutilation,
by the investigator's definition,

would be the flesh taken off their jaw,
with the jawbone polished white.

Usually, the tongue is taken out.

This is very, very difficult
to do surgically.

Oftentimes, an ear is missing, an eye.

The animal's reproductive organs
are popped out.

But if the blood is missing,

that's the telltale sign
for a classic mutilation.

I couldn't find any blood anywhere.

No puddle of blood.
No nothing. Just a dead cow.

There was no blood.

Typically, when there's a dead animal,
it's a bit of a scene.

I mean, it looks like a crime scene.
There's blood everywhere.

I mean, we're talking about a cow or bull.

That's up to 13 gallons of blood
that could be lost.

And there's nothing on the ground.

[Anderson] It'd be a bloody mess.

And there was no blood
where our heifer was laying there dead.

The most puzzling aspect of this case was

I couldn't figure out
why there wasn't more blood

from the mutilation.

There would've been blood
all over the place.

It's just bizarre.

It's so bizarre, this stuff.
It's hard to wrap your head around.

It doesn't make sense to me,
and I don't understand it.

[man] No rancher has been harder hit
than Eli Hronich.

Fourteen of his cows have been mutilated.

A pathologist concluded
the cuts were made by, quote,

"The application of high temperature
as a dissecting process."

[tense music playing]

[Holmes] When it comes to investigating,

we're literally looking for anything,

but tracks are number one,

trying to find evidence
of how somebody got in there.

I found absolutely no tracks. At all.

The fact
there was lack of tracks and stuff

just really made my hair stand up on end.

[ethereal music playing]

And that takes a lot for me.

[Hodges] The fences aren't cut.

Grass isn't tromped over
where somebody walked through it.

Nothin'.

Nothin'.

No footprints.

No four-wheeler tracks.

No pickup tracks.

And then I'd say the other thing,

whoever's doing the mutilation,

I don't know how
they get the cattle incapacitated

to where they can work on 'em.

[Holmes] There's been discrepancies
in thoughts of how these animals

are getting k*lled.

We're not finding any g*nshots,
any b*llet holes.

[tense music playing]

[Lantis] I know how powerful cattle are.

They're strong.

I mean, we had a bull
weighed over 2,000 pounds.

There's just no way five or six people
could even think of taking one down.

That's a lot of animal
to just plop over on his side

and not leave a mark anywhere.

[Sperry] Cattle are a prey animal,

so they are ever vigilant
about what's around them.

[cow snorts]

You rarely can sneak up on one.

You don't just walk up to
a big, healthy animal like this

and tell it to lay down.

You gotta do something to it.

So it'd have to have been
some kind of a dart or sleeping thing

to make it fall.

[unsettling music playing]

[Holmes] There's dart g*ns out there today

that individuals use
for doctoring animals.

Are you dealing
with some kind of a coagulant,

that, you know,
the blood coagulates in a... in an instant

and that animal freezes in its tracks?

[woman] Somebody had to
have tranquilized her

and then gave her a shot of that stuff
that "colligates" your blood

because there was no b*llet holes,
no nothin'.

[O'Brien] One of the ingenious elements
of this whole mystery

is the animal
usually lays in the environment

for at least three or four days
before it's even discovered.

[Holmes] When you have an animal
that's been dead for four, five, six days,

any attempt for, like, blood draws
or anything like that are done.

You're not gonna find anything
in the blood or tissue samples.

Any drugs in the system
would've been long gone.

I honestly didn't know what to sample.

It's not something that is probably
gonna be worth anything anymore

because the blood
has already started to degrade.

[Hodges] We took tissue samples,

but by the time the samples get there,
they're rotten,

and so they can't find anything
about cause of death.

[man] No reasonable person can sit here
and comprehend why someone

or some group of individuals
would want these body parts

from these animals.

It's just a senseless crime, you know?

It's just something
that isn't conducive to common reasoning.

[cow moos]

I wouldn't have a clue
what a motive would be.

[tense music playing]

In the days of when the buffalo
roamed the country,

the buffalo hiders,

one of the things that they did,
they took the tongues.

The tongues were kind of a delicacy
on the buffalo.

There is no value to any of the parts.

You go to a meat market,
and you can buy a tongue,

but it's a 10- or 15-dollar item, maybe.

The reproductive organs
have no real value.

Why would anybody
want those kind of things?

Other than it's for some kinda ritual
or something.

[man] Roving bands
of shadowy Satan worshippers

are frequently mentioned
as possible culprits in the mutilations.

A lot of folks believe it's a cult.
There's a lot of 'em.

[woman] They was getting ready
to make a sacrifice,

I think, to the devil over that red moon.

[O'Brien] I think there's ritualistic
and blood sacrifice

written all over this mystery.

It's the only blood-based
paranormal phenomenon,

and it leaves behind
the most physical evidence.

So that fact alone gives it a veneer

of almost an evil sort of predatory,

occultish kinda feel to it.

Now, police have been skeptical
when investigating these acts,

just as we are in reporting them,

but there is no question
that something is going on out there.

[O'Brien] Okay,
just a little date ID check.

It's May 4th, 1998, 11:55 in the morning.

Got this call from June Walkley
and her husband Virgil.

They spotted this animal

they said looked like
it'd been dropped on the fence.

Another thing that's...
that's interesting as well

is sometimes there's evidence
of the animal being dropped from a height.

Horns broken off,
heads twisted in an unnatural way,

clamp marks on the back
like it'd been picked up and dropped.

Spines with all the ribs broken off
right on the spine,

like it'd been dropped from great height
and snapped all the ribs.

So it does appear that these animals
are being picked up, taken somewhere,

experimented on, and then brought back

and dropped in a different place
in the pasture

than where they were picked up.

We've had cases that cows have ended up

five pastures away from where they were
originally supposed to be,

up to two, three, four,
even seven miles away.

Who's doing this? [clicks tongue]

I don't know, but they definitely...
have their modus operandi dialed in.

[man] Cows investigations have found
an unusually high correlation

between mutilations and UFO sightings.

[Allen] I've had two ranchers
tell me off the record

that the only thing
they can think of is UFOs.

I've also had people
who live in these very remote places

tell me that they have seen UFOs.

[Anderson] One thing that you hear
about this stuff is aliens.

I... I personally don't believe that.

Uh, I believe
this is being done by people.

It pisses me off. You're stealing.

It's theft.

In any other business,

when you steal from somebody,
there's consequences for that.

[man] In a state where cattle
are a billion-dollar industry,

theories about the mutilations
almost outnumber the ranchers

who talk about them.

Some think the criminals
come by helicopter,

flying through the night,
descending on herds.

Helicopters bearing men with poison darts,

or perhaps military men
trying out a new chemical.

[O'Brien] In the '70s,
we have sightings in Colorado,

where groups of as many
as seven helicopters are seen

harassing cattle herds.

These helicopter sightings,

when you start adding 'em up,

there's at least 350, 400 of them.

Documented sightings of helicopters
in and around mutilation sites,

mostly afterwards.

The fact these government helicopters,
we're assuming, are being seen

suggests that there may be some sort

of official, sanctioned
government program going on.

What are they doing?

[Allen] The possibility
of a group of people doing this

seems to be the one that law enforcement
has taken the most seriously.

I wonder if it's a serial-k*ller group
or some kind of group

that... that's capable
of doing something like this.

[Hodges] Some of
the greatest serial K*llers

eventually made a mistake.

They left something in there.
They were discovered.

I think if it was
two or three guys or a cult,

I think that something
would be found by now.

[O'Brien] Gotta be multi-generational.
We've been dealing with this now

for 40, 50, 60 years.

So it's not just one group of people
that were doing this.

That's always been
one of the stumbling blocks for this.

How come they haven't opened up,
and why don't we have a whistleblower?

Why don't we have somebody
that's come forward?

Uh, mutilation of a cow
or a bull is a crime.

It is something that's serious,

and it's an animal this time.

But what happens
if ranchers' kids are out there

on a four-wheeler or something

and they run across
somebody that's causing this?

Are they gonna take somebody's life
in addition to that?

[menacing music playing]

[Carter] Our bull got mutilated
within a half mile of our house.

It's really troubling
to think that somebody would come

within that close to the house
and k*ll something.

And who knows?

If somebody's demented enough
to come on the ranch

and k*ll and mutilate a bull or a cow,

what's gonna keep him
from coming in the house

and k*lling somebody?

That night, my daughter was home alone.

You know, you think you're safe
living way out of town,

way out here at the end of the road,
and... you just don't know that you are.

I think there is a real concern
of what might be out there.

The mystery just kinda continues to grow.

Tonight, authorities north of Houston
are investigating the mysterious death

of six cattle
found with their tongues removed,

but no blood spilled.

[Allen] I know that there's a lot of cases
happening in Texas right now.

Investigators say the cow's remains
weren't even scavenged by other animals.

An expert we spoke to says
that's just unusual.

[O'Brien] The Oregon cases
that happened in 2018 through 2021

were maybe just a presage
to a new wave that we have developing

in light of these new Texas cases
that have been reported,

which may number around a dozen now.

The Texas cases,

they all have been described
as being classic mutilations,

and they've all appeared to be
north of Houston in Southeast Texas.

The Animal Legal Defense Fund
has now stepped in

and is offering a reward for information
leading to the arrest and conviction

of the person or people responsible.

[O'Brien] Officials in Texas
are very, very tight lipped

and have not allowed
any, uh... to my knowledge,

any information out
about the nature of these cases.

[Holmes] It is frustrating
because I want answers.

If we start looking at collaborating

and coming up with
some kind of a... a group idea

on how to investigate these,

get some sort of a data system
or something where we can see

what's going on
in other counties and see their reports,

I think that there's a better chance
of getting some kind of closure.

[man] Authorities
in at least four counties

across Southeast Texas
investigating these cases.

All very similar.

So far, no arrests have been made.
If you have any information, call police.

[Holmes] We want
to get that information out there

because, for every one that's lost here,

there's how many more
lost in other states, other counties?

I hope if there's anybody out there
with any factual leads

that would put us in the right path
of solving what's going on,

that they would reach out
so we can get this behind us,

or at least know what we're dealing with
so that we know how to prevent it.

-[tense music playing]
-[cattle lowing]

[Holmes] I think the unknown
is probably the thing

that's the most unnerving,
is because there's no answer.

You know, maybe this is all
just some sort of weird tricksterous joke

that's being played on humanity.

[Allen] The kinds of people
that are out there

that are capable
of doing something like this,

the kinds of beings that are out there
capable of doing something like this,

I don't know. That is the mystery.

[Hodges] I do believe
it's done by something superior

to our way of thinking.

It's gotta be some grand experiment
of some sort.

And what that is, I don't know.

[tense music building]

[music fades]

[closing theme music playing]