You're Wrong About - Cattle Mutilation with Rachel Monroe

Episode Date: November 28, 2023

Mulder and Scully were busy this week, so Monroe and Marshall are on the case. Did UFOs really travel across the galaxy to experiment on American cows in the 1970s? And if so, why did they come back after fifty years?You can find Rachel online here.This episode was produced by Carolyn Kendrick.Links:UFOs and a Horse Called SnippyMutilations of Cattle In Texas, Oklahoma Called Work of CultsSix Cattle Found Dead in Texas With Their Tongues Missing"UFO Secrecy extends to NASA; cattle mutilations confuse authorities" Support You're Wrong About:Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are Good[YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseLinks:https://www.rachel-monroe.com/https://www.carolynkendrick.com/https://history.denverlibrary.org/news/western-history/ufos-and-horse-called-snippyhttps://www.nytimes.com/1975/03/02/archives/mutilations-of-cattle-in-texas-oklahoma-called-work-of-cults.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/22/us/cattle-deaths-texas.htmhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mhkc_ST8HEAhttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-goodSupport the show

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, okay, you want to decide who gets convicted of crimes now. Welcome to your wrong about, I'm Sarah Marshall, it's the holidays, and actually 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 medallations 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 gourd. 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 Chelsea 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 Yarrang about original audiobook of Charles Dickens, a Christmas Carol, read by me, 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 a 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 have carved up livestock and strange lights in the sky.

They fact that the 1890s in the U.S. but it wasn't until the early 1970s that a pattern began to emerge. Roving bands of shadowy satin worshippers are frequently mentioned as possible culprits in the mutilations. Some researchers insist there just aren't enough devil worshippers out there, especially in rural areas, to commit such widespread mayhem. House 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 Naff, I witness news 8. George Naff, I witness news eight. Welcome to hear on 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 were the New Yorkers Texas correspondent? That's certainly how I describe myself. So that I guess that makes it true. Yeah. Yeah. What have you written about recently? What have you written about not so recently? Well, what should people find of yours? Whatever will be recent will be in the future for present me 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. Which like 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, 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 Rubenstein talking about any creepy thing that had been alleged to happen in 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 years that there was a 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.

And that's supposed 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 it scarier phrase? And that really makes you think. But that like cows would have like their utters 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 up in both UFO stuff and satanic panic stuff and people were saying that I saw a black helicopter in the area. So therefore, Satanus came down from a helicopter and mutilated the cattle to steal the blood for the rick. People were kind of drying a straight line between the two main paranormal stories at the

time where we're like, well, it makes sense for the Satanist 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 reemerge 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.

Nobody served long. Thank God. 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 the first famous mute of the modern era who is not actually a cow, but a horse. Oh no. Oh, the horse had the unfortunate name of Oh, no. The horse had the unfortunate name of Snippy.

Oh. Yeah. You know, that's just a little bit. Yeah. Oh, it's snappy. Snippy was a three-year-old apple-lusa living in Alamosa, Colorado. And Alamosa's like sort of 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 worse does not come home for dinner, which is unusual. And then a 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. It's pretty intact. So this is like, not what we would end up calling a classic mutilation, but it's just like, snippies dead and it looks weird. You should have your own oxykin show. Thank you. I'm angling for it. And this just becomes huge local news. And there's something about this story that, like, looking back at it, I'm like, oh, the Cal 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 it is, I like like have to stress that these photographs of Snoopy look weird and I'm not a, you know, should we look at Snoopy? I would like to.

You should Google Snoopy. 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, a pre-internet meme. You know, like, these just these like photographs of things that look weird have always traveled. Oh, okay.

I'm looking, yes. I'm like, 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 her head too. So it's just like, right, everything is, but it's really striking to see

and there is a clean cut where the flesh and the body end. I don't have a great explanation for this. I mean, they did do it in a frost scopy of, 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 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 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 said 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 remains the talk of the town. And then it's someone posing with Snippy Skeleton, which has been like arranged and mounted nicely somewhere outdoors. Where is Snippy now? Can we go, 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 Ske skeleton is in a warehouse somewhere. Oh my God, like an old animatronic. But you know, it seems 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. You know what? Like, what? 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 was, Snippy attacked by ants. Which I think is a good question. It is, well, the article is like basically a mouse piece 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. That's true. God bless you, Snippy. I'm sorry that you gave your life and such a weird piece of culture. It 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 went down a bunch of like strange detours when researching this. And there was a whole phenomenon in the UK in the late 19th, early 20th centuries called Horse Rippings, which is like the English equivalent

of cow mutilation, 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 these animals were harmed by humans. In most cases, that's not what seems to have happened, but there are some, there's an incredible case called the great, they were called the Great Riley Outreages, 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, ah-ha! Clearly he has bad eyesight and so like there's no way that he could have gotten away with all this nocturnal maming and naming and basically got him out of prison. But it kind of seemed like maybe he did it anyway. That's a 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, 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 we're stripping the side. The mutilations really start to kick off as a phenomenon in 1973, first in Kansas and Nebraska. Dictics in an office, no cattle mutilations, Nixon leaves office, mutilation city. Oh no, there's a big Nixon tie, we'll get to it. Oh, okay.

It's basically one of these situations where we have the local paper is covered and then the Kansas City paper covers it and then newsweek picks it up and the more news coverage there is, the more reports there are. That doesn't mean that it's fake. That could just be people saw something and then they connect it to this broader phenomenon that they wouldn't have otherwise. But then all of a sudden,

the narrative also starts to coalesce around a certain group of characteristics. It's not just like Snippy is a horse and is dead and looks weird. It's like, okay, now it's gotta be a cow and it's gotta be 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 cord out. Which I really is gross. Ooh. 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, like, mimic a graph, you're like cattle mutilation zine. Fucking anyone can be a conspiracy theorist now.

You can turn on a front facing camera. Exactly. Exactly. Back then, oh my God, the type setting involved. You had to literally cut and paste. One of the big ones was by Ed Sanders, who's like the guy who 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 know, I have a copy of these like veterinary and 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 hobbyest 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 they're 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 having interest in a cult or conspiratorial things. Otherwise, the farmers are just sort of like a source of that information. 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. Or you'll have radio shows. We're also really big. Radio call and shows would be really like,

I, my neighbor told me that, whatever. And then these phrases, particularly surgical precision, start to become almost a requirement, part of the lore. There's a really funny investigation. There's an FBI agent, 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 marks. Like there are clear bite marks around this count. Like, why did you say surgical precision? And the guy's like, well, let's just, you know, everybody says surgical precision.

Ah. It's just what you say. Right, exactly. As in many kind of conspiracy situations, like what gets counted as being spooky or strange, it's like a shifting signifier, right? People will be like, there are no markings around the cow where they'll be like, there are 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 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. 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. 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. Right. And it's on a Bluetooth or something. You know, the stories that get showed around on Facebook and that have this tenor of like, because I felt scared, that means I was in danger, which think and get turned into

because I felt scared, I had to call the police and potentially contribute to killing someone, which is a, 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. 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 Goldman, 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 Cal 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 think this is something that people, like I didn't realize, like, the FBI was involved, the Mounties did an investigation, the ATF didn't 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. An enormously huge as a story. I mean, you never hear about chak torrents reading about it in the shining. And as 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 and 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.

Nick's on 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 experiments. Like 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 dozing college students

and prisoners, you know, with like all sorts of weird things and their experiments. Like, there's no, you know, like why do they want to go steal your cow, you know, like it's not, 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. But there, you know, like it's also not, it's not completely wild.

I mean, I didn't know about this, but apparently there was a situation in Utah a few years earlier where 6,000 sheep in a place called Skull Valley just collapsed and convulsed and died. The shepherd was like, what is going on? It turns out that there was an army base nearby that was testing out nerve gas. I think that this was the inspiration for Stephen King's The Stand. Oh, really? I might remember it wrong, but 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. 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 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 two regular Americans, I would even say, but with the attitude that regular Americans kind of simply don't matter, that we 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. like MKLs for a right where the CIA is trying to create super sculptures by giving them horrific quantities of LSD where it's like, 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 and skull valley and like a couple others, the government is like, oh, okay. So after that incident with the sheep and skull valley and like a couple others, the government was like, okay, 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 we'll do this, like, find this elaborate kind of loophole to get around it. It both seems to 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 the, 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. Yeah. 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 putting them back or is the helicopter like dropping off, you know, the scientist who mutilates the cow and then the scientist is like taking it.

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 wow people were shooting at them. They're like vigilante groups, the form that start doing like traffic stops on cars that have like out-of-state plates.

Oh my god. Utility helicopter that's repairing power lines gets shot. The Nebraska National Guard ordered all of their helicopters to fly it uh 2000 feet instead of 1000 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. more viscerally scary format.

It's not like some bureaucrat in DC. It's like somebody is literally taking my cow and hurting it. Well, the black helicopters feel so connected to this 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 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 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 kind of stories are accumulating in 1973, in 1974, in 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. He starts covering the local mutilations very actively. It starts in July, there's a thousand pound cow with, had its nose, one eye and ear, and

it's tongue cut away. No footprints. He reports that the local sheriff's deputies, like, were unable to take a photo of the carcass, 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 and 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 puts his mother in 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 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 covering this. And then he starts to 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 the like blood is thrown

onto his door at home. And then he vanishes in December. Wife files and 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 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 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? Which is like the last we've heard of him. What is this guy's name or names? Dane Edwards is his like when he's doing mutilation stuff. This is kind of the heart of the research experiences. 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 human drama in a beautiful way. Exactly. The beauty of the con man is like the constant readvention and it seems like he was a good one 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. It's a role that like hyper-credulous cops have played in spreading conspiracies is really kind of alarming.

Yeah. So this begins, this is like the credulous cop here as a 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 commutations 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.

How oriented makes it sound like they are eventually going to 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? I mean, 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 real, really real, right? And I'm doing, I guess the name of the leader of the occult. Yes. Lucifer Satan.

His name is Howard, apparently. Oh, that's better. That's much better. Howard. Oh, isn't your mother worried? So this guy in prison is feeding the ATF investigator. All of these stories in the ATF investigator, like get so invested that he's,

he's like, boss, I need to be put on this case full time. No. Of course, just starts leaking to the press, and then the press is writing these articles, they start quoting Michael Warnke, your old buddy. Oh my gosh, Mike Warnke, the satanic priest. Yeah. Yeah. He, he, uh, God, when I think of Mike Warnke, who wrote the wonderful, made up memoir of the Satan seller about becoming a satanic high priest,

I think about him going to this satanic meeting in a fancy house. And 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 canopays. Live in fear, you must live in fear. You gotta make hot canopays, Howard, you gotta up your game. How's your, 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 to trend. So it feels to me like a Shaharizad kind of situation. Like the bank robbers just like spinning at his add he's like and the cult is is involved in trying to steal plutonium. Like somehow plutonium gets involved. It is Shaharazade and it's also Henry Lee Lucas who's also shaharazade. 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 the 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, there's not enough time today, but tomorrow, come back, meet me 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 game too. And that guy also, you know,

was like, shea herzade, this ATF investigator, both of these, both of these informants were like, oh, we're, 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 Jays 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. Oh, it is? I'm just gonna rip. Yeah, she just ripped herself off 40 or 50 times. Wow. J 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. You know what the Satanist 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 sort of like part of the hypochalusatanic 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, who is significant extent, gets a big blood dumped on her at the prom, iconically. And because he's a guy from small town main when he asked us all the question of where do you get blood, he's like, oh, you know, you just need to go into 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 bookshore. 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 kernel 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 Goask Alice by Wich, of course, I mean, she wrote it, did take like significant portions of an actual teenager's journal in life and then added in all the Satan cow mutilation over the top fear, mongering, Mormon stuff. And so not only it's 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. Let's scarier them, 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 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 exploitation 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 was like, 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 that 1970s aesthetic is incredible. It's like all these kind of ranchers you, 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 and his mouth and be like, well, well, mama, 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 like 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, the government covering up toxic chemicals in the water, legitimate stuff. She doesn't make a huge point of it, but the hypothesis is the aliens are taking the cows because they want to test samples to measure how pollution is impacting us, which I think

is a sweet theory. It's an Earth Day cowutilation crossover or something. I think I really believe in, you know, 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, they can be the kind of malevolent force, but they can also be these higher beings that see more or know more and know that we're killing the planet and are coming to warn us or whatever, by through the strange mechanism of cutting out the utters of cows. Right. Because like it's, you know, I mean, they could leave a note, you know,

they could leave a note at literally any time. Exactly. But that kind of like fades away to, I think that the cow mutilation kind of gives way to the like abd- 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. We're like, these things that that sound really scary are actually like very part, were like these things that sound really scary are actually like very explicable,

like the idea that why the tongue and the eye and the ear is gone, 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 otters too, that testicles or whatever, like that's actually like quite normal that that's where a predator would start.

Sometimes you'll see these animals will have like half of the lower half of the jaw, like Snippy had more extensive than that, but it'll start with part of the face being gone. But these cows, when they die, their tongues will be sticking out, and so the predation will start at the tongue and work its way back. A lot of times you'll have things like the guy, Rommel, who was the FBI agent that I was

mentioning, who had investigated a bunch of these. He says, oh, 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 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 can see the 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 or smaller, you know, don't have the kind of like clawing appearance that like a coyote would, 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, 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's out 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, there, 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, there's like 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, like, why can't we just like have a conversation? But there's, there's like something about, you know, that 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 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 little hole. Yeah, what are they trying to hide? And so, yeah, 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, maybe people are seeing like weird looking

carcasses in their fields, but like who do you tell? Like 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 like 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 like a lot of the, 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, like in Eastern Oregon, a lot of them near where the Bundes, when they occupied the government building, in that area, so this is obviously a place with a lot of conflict over 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 everything old is new again. Yeah, and I mean, do you think that that's what's happening that you get 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 utilation. Oh my God. Special on his like Fox news show or whatever. The, 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 gotta 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

create this feeling of horror and disgust. He doesn't really come down on a, was it the government, was it UFOs, was it the Satanists? He's just a little bit like, I don't know, some say. It's just a little bit like, I don't know, some say. Like, it's the woke mind virus. But I do think 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 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 an actual process and as 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, if the federal government is attacking the beef industry, they don't want you eating beef. It's funny because I was prepared for that to resolve in a slightly credible sounding conspiracy theory where 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, right. Because the idea that like, well, we have to kill off some of these cows so that people eat less meat because we're gonna force everyone to eat bugs. It's like, is it profitable for anyone to force meat to eat bugs? Because the conspiracies that I believe in are the ones where the motive is profit, because

I feel like that's where it makes sense. 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, 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 buggerarian. But you know, a buggerarian. Have you looked into like who's invested in cricket, who's invested in cricket futures? You know, like you looked into like who's invested in cricket? Who's invested in cricket futures? You know, like, yeah, listen, I've had some some delicious crickets in my time. I'm ready.

I accept. Well, the world, the future, 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. You know, it's 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 growth 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 in danger in 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 were 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 see sickness 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 sea sick 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 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 have some sort of coherence. And even just trying to have a villain that's not just a system. A system is a hard villain to wrap your mind around and also kind of like an undefeatable villain. But like a helicopter you can shoot down.

I think this idea of like we're in the world, West, and we're not being listened to. It was a phenomenon among small farmers and ranchers, 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 plate 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 like something that the more energy you put into the system, like the bigger it would grow. Yeah. What do you think is going to happen next with our cattle mutilation problem? If we assume that what's happening now is a mutation of what happened in the 70s, it seems like probably we'll see more of them cropping up and maybe they'll be associated

with other uncanny phenomena. Is my guess. I mean, it's interesting to me that the recent ones that 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 is like understanding of virality, right? And like what stories tend to go big.

Like maybe it was the news editor's 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. 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 ways and so. Yeah, and that's the real black helicopter. Truly. Hovering over us all. And see. 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 gusting 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 can find her stuff on the internet. I hear there's a lot of good stuff on the internet. She is at Rachel-man-row.com. That's Rachel-man-row.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 Carolyn Kendrick.com. No Dash. She got in first. That's our episode. We'll see you soon. you