IT SO REMINDED ME OF THE HUNDREDS OF SUCH MUTILATIONS WE SAW IN TEXAS IN THE 1970s.
'Not One Drop Of Blood': Cattle Mysteriously Mutilated In Oregon
OCTOBER 8, 2019, BY NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO (NPR)
"At Silvies Valley Ranch in remote eastern Oregon, five young purebred bulls mysteriously showed up dead on the ranch this past summer, drained of blood and with body parts precisely removed.
The ranch's vice president, Colby Marshall, drives his truck down a U.S. Forest Service road.
"Then we'll get out and take a little walk to where one of the bulls was found. And the carcass is still there," Marshall says.
Coming upon one of the dead bulls is an eerie scene. The forest is hot and still, apart from a raven's repeating caw. The bull looks like a giant, deflated plush toy. It smells. Weirdly, there are no signs of buzzards, coyotes or other scavengers. His red coat is as shiny as if he were going to the fair, but he's bloodless and his tongue and genitals have been surgically cut out.
Marshall says these young livestock were just reaching their top value as breeding bulls. The animals are worth around $6,000 each. And since these were breeding bulls, hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of future calves were lost too.
Finding these young Herefords in this remote country can sometimes take the ranch's experienced cowboys days. Ranch staff members are now required to ride in pairs and are encouraged to carry arms.
"It's rugged," Marshall says. "I mean this is the frontier. If some person, or persons, has the ability to take down a 2,000-pound range bull, you know, it's not inconceivable that they wouldn't have a lot of problems dealing with a 180-pound cowboy."
Theories abound
Harney County Sheriff's Deputy Dan Jenkins has been working the cattle cases and has gotten dozens of calls from all over offering tips and suggestions.
"A lot of people lean toward the aliens," Jenkins says. "One caller had told us to look for basically a depression under the carcass. 'Cause he said that the alien ships will kinda beam the cow up and do whatever they are going to do with it. Then they just drop them from a great height."
Jenkins says the cases have been tough, with little evidence and no credible leads.
On his whiteboard, he has a running list scrawled in green marker with the top theories. What's clear: It isn't bears, wolves, cougars or poisonous plants. Nor were the animals shot.
The FBI won't confirm or deny that it's looking into the multiple slaughters.
Two years ago and 200 miles south, near New Princeton, Ore., one of Andie Davies' cows was also found cut up and bloodless.
She and her husband drove concentric circles around the corpse, but they never found any tracks.
And in this dusty country, "everything you do leaves tracks," Davies says.
Back in the 1980s, one of Terry Anderson's mother cows was mysteriously killed overnight. Standing at his ranch near Pendleton, Ore., Anderson points to the exact spot where he found her on top of a mountain.
He remembers his cow lying dead, her udder removed with something razor sharp."And not one drop of blood anywhere," Anderson says.
He has never gotten over it.
"It's just left a really strange feeling with me since that day. You can't explain it," Anderson says. "And, you know, no one else has been able to explain it."
The Harney County Sheriff's Office continues to field calls on the killings. And Silvies Valley Ranch has put up a $25,000 reward for information that could solve the case."
IN 2009, MUTILATIONS BEGAN POPPING UP AGAIN IN COLORADO, AS THE DENVER POST REPORTED.
"Predators ruled out.
Colorado cow mutilations baffle ranchers, cops.
"Four calves, all killed overnight. Their innards gone. Tongues sliced out. Udders carefully removed. Facial skin sliced and gone. Eyes cored away. Not a single track surrounding the carcasses, which were found in pastures locked behind two gates and a mile from any road. Not a drop of blood on the ground or even on the remaining skin. - Manuel Sanchez, longtime rancher.
Every rancher who has reported similar cattle deaths — and there have been at least eight such deaths in southern Colorado this year — uses the same description.
“They just stripped this one,” says Tom Miller, who in March was one of three ranchers near Trinidad who discovered mutilated cattle.
There by the trough — past the locked gate a quarter-mile from U.S. 350 east of Hoehne — was the calf. Its front legs and torso were gone. Its back legs were hanging by hide to a shattered pelvis and a meatless backbone. Miller thought a pack of coyotes had torn into the calf the night before.
Then he saw the ears: sliced off the head in circular, surgical-like cuts. He noticed that there were no tracks. And no blood anywhere.
Colorado Brand Inspector Dennis Williams came out and looked at Miller’s calf. He lives next door; the calf would be the last of three strangely mutilated cattle that he would investigate in March of this year.
“I’ve heard about it. It was weird, to say the least. Totally unexplainable. To me, it looked like that calf had been dropped from a high distance, the way its hips were dislocated and all its broken bones,” Williams says.
That same month, ranchers had called Williams to grisly scenes northeast of Aguilar and west of Weston to investigate mysteriously mangled cattle that had been seen healthy the day before.
To add to the weirdness, Sanchez, Miller and Mike Duran, who found a sliced Red Angus cow near Weston in March, have all experienced similar mutilations before. Sanchez lost cows in 2006 and 1993, Miller in 1997 and 1980, and Duran in 2000 and 1995."
//WW
HI, BUBBLEWRAPS. IT HASN'T BEEN JUST COWS, BUT MOSTLY COWS. HORSES AND SHEEP HAVE ALSO BEEN FOUND SIMILARLY MUTILATED SINCE AT LEAST THE 1970s.
ReplyDeleteFEW REALIZE THERE HAVE BEEN ALMOST IDENTICAL HUMAN MUTILATIONS, LIKE THE ONE IN BRAZIL, 1988.
FROM THE CORONER'S REPORT ON THAT, "Although the victim had been dead for 48 to 72 hours there was no sign of being eaten by animals or starting to rot, as would be expected. There was no smell. Bleeding from the wounds had been minimal. The lips and flesh from the face had been cut away. The eyes, ears, and tongue had been removed. Neat round holes, one to one and a half inches in diameter, had been made on the shoulders, arms, head, stomach, and anus and tissue and muscle had been extracted. The holes had not been made through which extensive digestive organs had been extracted. The scrotum, but not the penis had been removed, and all pubic hair had disappeared. The rectum had been cored out. Despite these devastating mutilations, there was no sign that the victim had been bound or had struggled in any way."
A "Dr. Goes Rubens", who concurred that it was all very odd indeed, and seemed inexplicable by normal definitions. It was also pointed out by an associate of Rubens that the mutilations on display with the mysterious body had many of the same hallmarks of the more well-known cattle mutilations, such as a lack of decomposition, organs seemingly selectively removed, precision, almost surgical cuts, and anomalous holes bored into the corpse."
BUT BEFORE THAT THERE IS THE 1956 CASE OF AIR FORCE SERGEANT JONATHAN LOVETTE. "His tongue had been removed through his jaw, his eyes had been removed, his body had been completely drained of blood and, like other mutilations, his anus had been hollowed out." LIKE THE POOR GUY IN BRAZIL.
THE DYATLOV PASS INCIDENT, JANUARY, 1959, NINE VARIOUSLY MUTILATED CORPSES RECOVERED. SOME FOUND TO HAVE RADIATION POISONING.
UNSOLVED MYSTERIES, ALL.