THE MYSTERY OF CATTLE RUSTLERS FROM THE SKIES
Three farmhands outside of Twin Falls, Idaho, told police that a glowing elliptical machine settled in a field near an isolated steer on September 7, 1956. The men started to run towards it but it shot upwards and disappeared. The steer apparently went with it, for it was gone. Another case, later discounted as an April Fool's Day joke, appeared in west coast newspapers in 1963. A bewildered farmer in Chileno Valley, California, was supposed to have reported that a flying saucer had stampeded his herd of cattle. Aroused by the rumpus, he reached the scene just in time to see a group of ”short men in white coveralls” grab a calf and haul it into the object.
A farmer in Isola, Italy, accused ”three dwarves in metallic diving suits” of stealing several of his pet rabbits on November 14, 1954. He claimed he caught the thieves red-handed near his hutches. He said he had seen a bright cigar-shaped machine land nearby and had grabbed his rifle. But when he confronted the rustlers the rifle not only failed to fire but became so heavy he had to drop it. Then he found himself paralyzed, unable to move or speak, while the little men carried his rabbits off to the object and flew away.
In South America that UFOlogist paradise, police officials investigating extensive flying saucer reports in Barcelos, Brazil, in September 1962, learned that seventeen chickens, six pigs, and two cows had all vanished during the UFO wave. A man also disappeared during that ”flap.” His name was Telemaco Xavier, and he vanished near the village of Vila Conceiçao late on the night of September 1, 1962. Three plantation workers testified that they had seen a lone man walking down a deserted road that night, when an illuminated circular object spraying sparks swept down from the sky. Three men leaped out, grabbed the lone stroller, and dragged him off. Whether of not Senhor Xavier was that man remains unproven. But he was never seen again.
Minutes away from New York City several pigs reportedly vanished from their well-protected pens at the Agricultural College in Farmingdale during August 1967. There had been repeated power failures in the area throughout the summer, and many flying saucer sightings had taken place there. We visited the college and learned that single pigs had been removed from several different pens. Since the pigs were enclosed by high fences, it would have seemed more reasonable for an intelligent pig thief to confine his activities to one pen. At 10:00 P.M. on February 5, 1968, many people in Farmingdale proper said that a large luminous sphere had appeared over the town.
West Virginia and Ohio have had all kinds of animal mysteries since their UFO ”flap” began in 1966. Shortly after sundown on the evening of November 14, 1966, Newell Partridge of Salem, West Virginia, was watching television when suddenly the set ”began to make noises like a generator.” As he decided to take a look outside, his thoroughbred German shepherd, Bandit, ”started carrying on something terrible.” He flashed a light into a neighboring field and saw what he described as two bright red glowing objects. Bandit growled and ran into the field. The lights vanished, and the dog was never seen again.
A week later another West Virginian, a man who asked to remain anonymous ”because people think those who see this thing are crazy,” reported that a cigar-shaped object that ”sounded like a Washington time signal” landed in his yard. His dog ran toward the object and was apparently attacked by something before the object flew off. The animal limped back bloody and badly frightened.
Across the Ohio River, William Watson's German shepherd disappeared early in November and was found a week later in the center of an isolated field on Georges Creek Road outside of Gallipolis, Ohio. The knee-high grass around the dog's body was pressed flat in a perfect circle twenty feet in diameter. Although there was no sign that the dog had been attacked by any known animal every bone in its body was crushed and there was absolutely no blood in evidence.
When we visited Gallipolis in December of that year, we discovered that many people had seen unidentified flying objects around Georges Creek Road. Mrs. Marilyn Taylor told us that she had been driving there at 7:15 P.M. on the evening of December 9, 1966, when a circular reddish-orange light appeared in front of her car at telephone-pole-height. It bobbed up and down, she said, and flashed beams of light towards the road. ”It was the size of a helicopter, but it was no helicopter,” she declared. She said she followed it for about a mile until she reached a well-lighted area near a transformer installation. Then the object shot into the air and disappeared. Her four children were with her in the car, and her six-year-old boy expressed great fear of the object.
This woman, whom we will call Mrs. Bryant, had seen large luminous spheres at treetop level around her home. Furthermore, she claimed that an elderly couple who had lived on her property for years had often told her about the strange lights in the area. Sightings went back thirty years. The couple had described them as being like ”a lantern on a stick that somebody waves back and forth in the hills.”
Mrs. Bryant's troubles with cattle ”rustlers” had started back around 1963-64. Her house had burned to the ground during that period and she built a new one-story ranchhouse on the same site. The cattle ”rustlers,” she explained, had ruthlessly butchered a number of her animals very expertly. But they didn't seem to want the choice steak cuts. Instead they rather pointlessly removed the brains and other organs of little commercial value. And there was never any blood in evidence. She had complained repeatedly to both the police and the FBI.
Her children confirmed that strange things were also happening to their telephone, and Mrs. Bryant was convinced that someone was tapping it. She also said that she had once awakened alone in the house, unable to move, and felt a wave of almost overpowering heat as she heard the kitchen door open. She had double-locked it before going to bed, she assured us. While she lay there helplessly, she said she saw a tall figure walk through the kitchen and apparently go out another locked door on the other side. That door, we discovered when we visited the house, led to nowhere. There were no steps outside it; only a steep drop to the ground.
Other strange sounds prevaded the house, she claimed. She had heard heavy footsteps on the roof and loud metallic clangs. The house is situated on a hill far back from a narrow dirt road and commands a good view of the surrounding area. Mrs. Bryant's twelve-year-old son told of his own sightings and he also remarked about the big Air Force ”flying boxcar” cargo planes which frequently flew over the area at treetop level. A year earlier we would have put Mrs. Bryant down as paranoid. Her story smacked of a persecution complex gone amok. But we had heard too many similar tales in our travels to take hers lightly.
Have you ever awakened in the middle of the night with the uneasy feeling that there was a stranger in the room, or in the house? This has happened to nearly everyone at some time or another, excluding, of course, the incidents in which that someone proved to be a real burglar or prowler. But it seems to happen too often with UFO witnesses and ”contactees.” On a warm June evening in 1962, Gregory Sciotti, eighteen, woke up around 11:30 P.M. with that feeling. He was alone in the little house near Turtle Creek, Pennsylvania, for his mother worked on the night shift in a nearby factory.
”There was a light in the room,” Mr. Sciotti wrote to us in 1967. ”I quickly tried to get up and found it impossible to move. I tried to turn my head to see where the light was coming from. This I also found impossible. It seems as though the only control I had was over my eyelids. The feeling I had was something like when you're very tired; you know, just too tired to move. Then I heard something on the steps just outside the door. Something like a heavy breathing sound. I heard it moving around. I tried to scream to find out if I was dreaming... but I couldn't do anything but move my eye lids. Then, just like it started, it stopped.
The light went out and it was like I was pushing on something heavy and it suddenly moved.” He ran down the stairs, badly frightened, grabbed a rifle and loaded it. He called for his dog Teddy, a collie, who, he knew, was somewhere in the house. But Teddy was gone. He searched the grounds around the house with a flashlight. He had another dog which was kept tied in the yard. That animal was also gone.
The next night, he continued, he was sitting in his car in the driveway, talking with a girl friend, when a strange object rose up from the woods behind the house. Four windows were visible on a dark oval shape as it passed between the moon and the young couple. It was not an airplane, he declared.
”I feel rather silly discussing this,” he concluded. ”And have never mentioned it to anyone but my mother and my wife. My mother sort of laughed at me and told me I was dreaming... but there is not a doubt in my mind that the incident took place. We never did find a trace of our two dogs.” The best-publicized animal case of 1967 involved Snippy, the pet horse of Mrs. Berle Lewis, which was found mysteriously butchered near Alamosa, Colorado, that September. Flying saucers had been reported consistently in the area for over five years, according to Alamosa County Sheriff Ben Phillips. But he theorized that Snippy was the victim of a stray lightning bolt. A pathologist from Denver examined the horse's carcass, however, and found that all of the fluid had been drained from the brain in some manner. He rejected outright the lightning theory. This particular case was badly muddled by an amateurish investigation and became the center of a totally meaningless controversy.
NICAP's final conclusion was that some hoaxters had hauled a vat of acid out to the field where Snippy was prancing, slit the animal's throat with a scalpel, built a huge tripod with long, heavy poles, and lowered the horse into a vat of acid with block and tackle. Then they picked up their poles and vat and left. Somehow, it is easier to believe that ”little green men” did it. Whoever killed Snippy left an ordinary terrestrial-type thermometer behind.
Another rather circumstantial case took place in Ontario, Canada, early in November 1967. Two young men, Terry Goodmurphy and Steven Grexton, said they encountered a circular object about a hundred feet in diameter on Highway 17, outside of Livingston, Ontario. It was surrounded by an orange glow, they said, and ”went down towards the highway, stopped for a while, then came straight up and began traveling towards us. It appeared to be about a hundred feet up.”
The boys were so frightened that they slammed their car into reverse and backed down the highway in a panic. When officers of the Ontario Provincial Police visited the area, the object was gone, but they noted the smell of sulfur in the air. That same week two horses belonging to Lorne Wolgemuth in nearby Sowerby, Ontario, suffered strange cuts. A favorite riding horse, Fury, came to the barn one morning with a long, clean cut on its neck. When a mare, Susie, failed to turn up for breakfast, its owner went searching and found the animal dead in a field with its jugular vein deftly cut. That night, another horse owned by R. Boyer in Thessalon ”went wild.”
We have collected other animal mutilation cases from Pennsylvania, Washington, Oregon, Ohio, and West Virginia. In December 1967 another cow was found near Gallipolis, Ohio, with the unkindest cut of all – it had been neatly severed in two ”as if it had been chopped in half by a giant pair of scissors.” The organs and blood in the lower half had all been removed. Farmers in central Pennsylvania were so upset by their losses to the phantom animal mutilators that in 1968 they formed a local organization to try to catch the culprits. Even though strange lights and mysterious black helicopters were seen in the ”mutes” areas, the UFO buffs resisted the notion that there might be some link. They ignored the phenomenon even as the mutes began to spread slowly and systematically westward.
By 1973 the mutilators were at work in the central states and in Puerto Rico where newspapers began to headline the advent of ”vampires” who were killing domestic livestock and draining blood from the animals. Prior to his death in 1973, Ivan Sanderson was receiving reports of mysterious vans cruising through the hills of New Jersey where pet dogs and cats were disappearing in large numbers. One area in Connecticut lost seven hundred dogs in a brief six-month period. Irate pet owners all over the Northeast were holding meetings and demanding government action. The popular theory was that organized gangs were stealing animals to sell to sinister laboratories for use in grisly tests and experiments. Investigators found, however, that such labs were few and they were able to get all the animals they needed free from pounds and other legal sources.
When the mutilators moved into cattle country in the western states, ranches armed themselves and formed posses in a futile effort to solve the mystery. The news media was very slow in recognizing the epidemic. For the first few years only the local newspapers bothered to mention what was happening. Sheriffs and law enforcement authorities grumbled impotently about ”Satan worshipers” making animal sacrifices. In most cases, as we have already noted, only the tongues and sex organs were removed, usually with such surgical precision that investigating veterinarians were astonished. In a couple of startling incidents, the cows were still alive when found even though their anuses and other organs had been neatly snipped out. In every case, blood was absent from the site and from the carcasses.
Newspapers, news magazines, and the TV networks finally began to pay attention in 1974-75, as the numbers of dead animals steadily increased. Estimates vary widely but several thousand were certainly slaughtered in those years. Twenty-three states were affected by 1976 and even the sullen UFO buffs grudgingly admitted that maybe something untoward was happening... even though the saintly space people certainly couldn't be blamed. Other countries around the world, including Australia, Sweden, China, parts of Africa and South America, began reporting mutes, all sharing the characteristics of the U.S. mutilations. In 1980 the mutilators moved into Canada where the Canadian Royal Mounted Police lowered a curtain of censorship on the news reports for a few months, perhaps in the erroneous assumption that they could solve the mystery.
In the U.S. a government grant of $30,000 was given to Kenneth Rommel, an ex-FBI agent, to perform a study of the mutes. He concluded it was all the work of ”predators.” Not satisfied with this, a New York paperback house doled out $100,000 to a Greenwich Village bartender and he spent a month visiting western ranches. His book, which appeared years later, suggested the ranchers were exaggerating the number of mutilations and that it was mostly the fault of overenthused UFO buffs... the same buffs that had flatly refused to recognize the problem until the mutes began to appear almost at their front door. In Colorado a petite brunette TV anchorperson, Linda Moulton Howe, visited ranchers and produced an award-winning documentary, Strange Harvest, in 1980. She became so fascinated with the subject that she put her career on hold and toured the world, investigating new mute cases and lecturing about them.
The mutilators remained busy throughout the 1980s and farmers were shooting ineffectively at the black helicopters that often appeared silently over fields where dead animals were found. Mute reports were still coming in from Canada, Oklahoma, and scores of other places in the early 1990s. When the police in Fyffe, Alabama, were accused of engaging in a mute ”cover-up” in 1993, Marshall County Sheriff Ben Gamel responded: ”Why in the Lord's name would we have anything to cover up? We have had surgically mutilated animals in this county. I've never denied that.” Police officer Ted Oliphant said he had investigated thirty-five cattle deaths since October 1992, and only three of those could be explained as the work of buzzards or coyotes. People in Fyffe have been seeing strange lights in the sky for over thirty years, along with black helicopters that bear no markings or license numbers.
We know that animal mutilations have been taking place almost continuously for decades and not one single person has been arrested for any of them. Some police departments favor the satanic cult explanation but no cults have been located and no cultists have been caught in the act. The sheer numbers of mute cases seems to preclude that theory. In any case, cults usually sacrifice small animals like chickens. In some cases, such as Plano, Texas, in 1991, six cats were found after they had been dissected with a sharp instrument. They may have been the victims of some magical ritual. Human beings have been found mutilated in a few instances in New Jersey and in the western deserts but police found it easy to trace these crimes to local cults. What's the total score over the years? We can only guess. Some of the affected ranchers have estimated that around 10,000 animals are mutilated annually. This is probably much too high.
But if only two hundred were killed every year for the past thirty-five years that would be a total of 7,000. That's a lot of animal blood!
It seems that animal blood is not all that ”they” are after, either. In the wee hours of a rainy morning early in March 1967, a Red Cross Bloodmobile, laden with freshly collected human blood, was driving along Highway 2 next to the Ohio River, en route to Red Cross headquarters in Huntington, West Virginia. The driver was Beau Shertzer, and he was accompanied by a young nurse. As they hit a completely deserted stretch of road, a large glowing object lifted from a nearby hill and swooped over the vehicle. Shertzer rolled down his side window and looked up. He was horrified to see that some kind of arm or extension was being lowered from the glistering machine cruising only a few feet above the Bloodmobile.
The nurse saw another arm reaching down on her side of the truck. It looked as if the flying object was trying to wrap a pincer like device around the vehicle. The nurse went into hysterics, understandably, and Shertzer opened the engine up wide, trying desperately to outrun the thing. Apparently they were saved by the sudden appearance of headlights from approaching traffic. As the other cars neared, the object retracted the arms and hastily flew off. To this day Beau Shertzer refuses to drive along that highway. Was this a case of a UFO making a deliberate attempt to pick up a Bloodmobile and carry it off to some secret place? We can only speculate but it all sounds very ominous.
Some UFO theorists have speculated that terrestrial animal matter is important to the UFOnauts as raw material for the construction of solid physical entities. An alternative to collecting animal matter for the creation of physical beings would be to enlist the aid of terrestrials sexually for the purpose of crossbreeding and creating a new species that would be neither human nor – whatever ”they” are. There are a number of astounding incidents which seem to suggest that such biological experiments are actually taking place.
In occult lore there is a well-known historic phenomenon which has been heavily documented for centuries and has involved thousands of people, both male and female. This phenomenon involves the appearance of nonhuman entities who seduce and have sexual intercourse with their victims. An incubus is a male ”demon” who attacks sleeping females and fornicates with them. In many cases these entities return night after night. Such ”demon lovers” are discussed in ancient literature and psychiatrists are well familiar with the phenomenon. It seems to extend beyond mere sexual fantasy. There is sometimes physical evidence that the victim has experienced actual intercourse.
One weird case is fully described in a book titled UFO Warning by New Zealander John Stuart. He became obsessed with the UFO phenomenon in the early 1950s and was assisted in his research by an attractive young lady he calls Barbara. After making some close UFO sightings in 1954 and receiving anonymous threatening phone calls ordering them to discontinue their UFO studies, Barbara claimed that she returned home one night to find a foul odor in her apartment. Then she was brutally attacked by a creature she could not see. She said that it had a skin the texture of sandpaper. It raped her and left her body covered with small scratches. Later both Stuart and the girl saw a weird, loathsome monster with spindly limbs and covered with hair. ”It had no hands, the long fingers jutting from the arms like stalks,” Stuart wrote.
From time to time cases of this type receive worldwide publicity. A Reuters dispatch from Pretoria, South Africa, examined one such case in April 1968. A widow named Mrs. Anna de la Rovera protested to authorities that her house was haunted. In February 1968 she returned home one evening and found a man dressed in gray sitting on her front porch. When she asked him what he wanted, he ”simply stood up and walked into the house through the closed front door.” The mysterious stranger appeared frequently after that, often invading her bedroom and ”making amorous advances” to her. ”About a month ago after I had gone to bed one night,” she told reporters, ”I saw a dark apparition coming out of the kitchen. It was covered with long hair, and I particularly remember its long, curved fingernails.” Her children also saw this specter. Mrs. Rovera appealed to the Pretoria City Council for new housing.
The female counterpart of the incubus is known as a succubus; a female entity which materializes in the bedrooms of males and seduces them. The succubus phenomena is very real to priests and monks, and there are innumerable instances in which ravishing ladies supposedly materialized in their cells and tried to lure them into enjoying the sins of the flesh. Often the appearances of these entities are accompanied by ghost-like manifestations. Objects move of their own accord, pictures are wrenched from walls by unseen hands, and doors open and close by themselves. Busy poltergeists also seem to be directly linked to the UFO phenomenon, as we shall see further on.
If the UFOnauts are essentially alien but human in form, it might make sense for them to conduct crossbreeding experiments in an effort to produce beings with the full capability of breathing and functioning in the earthly environment. Such experiments have purportedly been going on for several years, although the victims are very reluctant to reveal their identities for perfectly obvious reasons.
In these cases, young men, usually from college communities, are taken aboard the objects and introduced to alien females. A student from a West Virginia college underwent this type of experience in the spring of 1967. Immediately after he was released from the UFO he went to a local hospital and submitted himself to a thorough examination which confirmed his claims. Two young men on Long Island also told me the same kind of story in the summer of 1967. One claimed to have performed as a voluntary breeder several times. He later suffered a spell of amnesia.
The best known case of this type occurred in Brazil in 1957 and was carefully investigated by Dr. Olavo T. Fontes, a prominent physician in Rio and one of the world's leading UFOlogists. Dr. Fontes filed a very long and detailed report with APRO at the time, but since the case was so unusual, it was not publicly revealed until 1966. The ”victim's” name was Antonio Villas Boas, a twenty-three year old farmer in the state of Minas Gerais. He told Dr. Fontes that four small men in gray one-piece suits and helmets took him aboard a saucer-shaped craft late on the night of October 15, 1957. There a sample of blood was extracted from him and he was placed in a chamber containing a couch. Smoke came from vents around the ceiling, he said, and created a gaseous mixture which smelled like ”burning oil cloth” and made him sick to his stomach. After he had adjusted somewhat to this new kind of atmosphere, the door opened and a nude girl entered.
She was very pale, short, had high cheekbones, elongated eyes, a very pointed chin, and very thin lips. Her hands were ”very long and narrow.” The healthy farmer did what comes naturally. Twice, in fact, he bragged. At the conclusion of the proceedings his strange mate patted her stomach and pointed towards the ceiling. Boas came down with symptoms of radiation poisoning after he was released, and these symptoms were still present when Dr. Fontes examined him a month or so later. Many of the smaller details of his once-utterly preposterous story have now been verified by more recent events in other parts of the world. His description of both the entities and some writing he saw on a door in the craft matches the descriptions of Betty and Barney Hill, the New Hampshire ”contactees,” and they could not possibly have ever heard of Boas.
Mrs. Hill recalled under hypnosis that a long needle was driven into her navel by the UFOnauts, and Barney complained that some cold instrument was placed over his genitals (he later developed a ring of warts in that region). One of the American males who told me of having an out-of-this-world sex experience said that the female he met was about five feet two inches tall, spoke little English, and had very thin silvery hair. No nauseous gas was injected into that saucer boudoir but he was given something ”thick and syrupy” to drink before he was introduced to the girl.
Dr. Jacques Vallee has researched this type of event in depth, burrowing into the records of the Catholic Church and the demonological literature. Incubi and succubi have traditionally been regarded as manifestations of the devil. In the Celtic countries the ”little people” have been credited with bizarre sexual activities often accompanied by hallucinations just as intriguing as the modern stories of hanky-panky aboard flying saucers. ”The devil does not have a body,” Dr. Vallee writes. ”Then, how does he manage to have intercourse with men and women?... All the theologians answer that the devil borrows the corpse of a human being, either male or female, or else he forms with other materials a new body for this purpose.”
By John A. Kell in the book 'The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings, p.85-91.Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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