Warning: Some of the links in here include pictures of dead animals. They can be pretty gruesome. Just wanted to give you a heads up, because they are making me sad.
A couple weeks ago, my cousin texted me two links. The first was a news story about cows in Texas who’ve recently been found dead and tongue-less, with spookily precise cuts on their faces and no blood or tracks around the spot where they’ve been found. The second was the first part of a five-part set of documents on the FBI’s website totaling close to one hundred pages, all on the animal mutilation panic in the 1970s. The file starts with a lot of communication involving Senator Floyd Haskell asking the FBI to investigate because ranchers in Colorado were spooked.
Evidently this happens to cows a lot, and it didn’t stop happening between the 1970s and today. Over the last five years, there have been flurries of news stories about it in Eastern Oregon on at least two occasions. Last summer, there was an incident in Alaska. The panic in the 1970s was big, and it’s hard to say it wasn’t justified. Ranchers saw something they hadn’t seen before among their dead cattle. Others soon saw dead cattle of their own in situations which resembled those described in the news. A pattern was observed. Or was it?
In 1979, the Washington County sheriff’s department in Arkansas is said to have run an experiment where they left a dead cow in a field for two days. The corpse is said to have bloated, its skin tearing in a straight line not unlike a surgical incision. Bugs are said to have eaten the softest of the tissue—parts not unlike the tongue. Elsewhere, veterinarians have explained the bloodlessness in these incidents by referring to blood, with no heart pumping it, pooling in the bottom of the body well before the skin breaks, far away from where it would bleed.
There’s an easy explanation here that says this is a classic panic: Something natural but unusual happens, people become scared and start looking for it, and suddenly they notice what looks like the same phenomenon when they wouldn’t have thought twice of it before. It’s a Rorschach Test, and with nearly one cow for every three people in the United States, you could estimate that somewhere in the magnitude of five or ten million cows die in America every year, meaning that if it only takes one with extraordinarily straight-line breaks in the skin to set off a chain of reports of mutilation, you only need the probability of those straight-line breaks to be 0.000013% to get one round of this news a year—this news that clearly does numbers for news agencies when it comes to consumption.
At the same time, though, the Army accidentally killed six thousand animals in 1968 with a nerve agent, so we really don’t know. Cattle mutilation is like a lot of imperfectly explained phenomenon this way. Most of the evidence points towards nothing unnatural being the case, but there are enough holes or appearances of holes in the story that if you really want, you can say it’s aliens or the government or a cult, and every now and then, the conspiracy theorist really is onto something. It depends what you want to be true, or, alternatively, what you’re so afraid of being true that you convince yourself it’s there.
The New Yorker ran a good piece on this latest panic earlier this week. The History Channel has an article up from a few years ago with theories on the supernatural. The Wikipedia article is patchy and dramatic, but shows a lot of pieces of the story, in very Wikipedia fashion. I’m going to see my cousin tonight. I’ll see if he’s uncovered any other evidence of skinwalkers while reading up on this in his sauna.
