Cattle mutilations in Wyoming and the West…

The horror of mutilated cattle, cheeks cut on one side, tongues missing, sexual organs removed, corpses drained of blood and no visible signs of predation made big, bold headlines across Wyoming and the West in the mid-1970s.

Wyoming received reports of mutilated cattle in Newcastle in Bridger Valley in Uinta County and in Sublette County. There were mutilated horses in Meeteetse and Carbon County. Two years later there was a report of a heifer outside of Casper found dead under similar circumstances.

In the years immediately following the Vietnam War and Watergate, suspects included American military personnel, whom some assumed were conducting experiments or collecting tissue, satanic cults, or UFO visitations.

A Nebraska senator’s efforts to involve the FBI were met with hesitancy and reluctance on the part of the agency, which only fueled speculation. The mystery has persisted for decades, still scaring ranchers and former law enforcement officers as Halloween approaches, reminding them of a real horror they experienced.

“It lasted in our area for three years,” former Uinta County Sheriff Leonard Hysell told Cowboy State Daily in an interview. “The first year we had it was an incredible amount, many.”

While the headlines faded in the 1980s, reports of periodic cattle mutilations have continued. In Texas, six cows were similarly mutilated in 2023. The mutilations that occurred in eastern Oregon communities in recent years were depicted in Netflix’s latest season of “Unsolved Mysteries.”

Current Wyoming Livestock Producers Association Executive Vice President Jim Magagna and Wyoming State Veterinarian Dr. Hollie Hasel said they are aware of no reports of mutilation incidents in the state since assuming their respective roles.

The mutilations begin

But in the 1970s, the losses were real and ranchers and law enforcement could not find a culprit or motive for the grotesque mutilations in the Cowboy State and the rest of the country.

The Casper Star-Tribune reported on October 26, 1975, that suspected cattle mutilations exceeded 45 cows, 10 in Sublette County and 16 in Uinta County. On Sept. 30, the newspaper reported on a calf north of Gillette that had its sexual organs severed and its stomach slashed with a sharp instrument.

The Campbell County Sheriff’s Office characterized the death as a “confirmed mutilation” after a veterinarian could not determine the cause of death and there were no signs or traces of predators or humans.

For Hysell, then Uinta County undersheriff, the incidents represented the strangest cases he investigated in his 47-year law enforcement career, including 20 years in Uinta County.

“We only took those that were recent deaths, anything that was more than 24 hours old we didn’t try to speculate on that,” he said. “Recent death that we really tried to investigate. We accumulate a large number of them. A single rancher had 16 head, six in one night in a pasture. “Now predators don’t do that anymore.”

Helicopter evidence

While many news reports talk about a lack of evidence and clues about the deaths, Hysell said he found some evidence at some of the sites that led him to suspect the cause, and it involved helicopters.

During the period when mutilated cattle were discovered, there were credible reports of military-type helicopters in the area and, on one occasion, three in different locations. Hysell said the planes had no numbers on the side, did not use lights and were only seen after dark.

“We found a lot of rotor debris around the bodies, we found marks from the landing skids,” he said. “That led me to believe that it was something a little more complicated. And predators would have nothing to do with those corpses. The birds wouldn’t peck at them. We never had incidents like that before and we never had any after. If they were predators, why didn’t it continue? “It just wasn’t like that.”

On September 3, 1975, the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph reported that El Paso County Undersheriff Gary Gibbs pointed out a satanic cult.

“They are nomadic people. In the last two years we have found evidence of similar events in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and Wyoming. This is not a small group. There are several thousand members throughout the country,” he was quoted as saying. “Some people laugh at the idea, but we have been working very hard on the problem and we have definitive proof. “We want to catch these people because we don’t know what they will do when they get tired of mutilating cows.”

Hysell said the cult theory was not something he agreed with because of the money needed to operate the helicopters he knew were flying in and around his county at the time. But he does know that the federal government and state agencies were extremely reluctant to help sheriff’s departments across the West. And that included in Wyoming.

“State crime labs would have nothing to do with anything in Wyoming or Utah,” he said. “I heard from other sheriff’s offices that that was the case they were facing in all their states.”

FBI file

An FBI file on the cattle mutilations reveals letters that were sent by Nebraska Senator Carl Curtis to FBI Director Clarence M. Kelly in 1974 requesting the federal agency’s help in solving the crimes.

“This will refer to my previous letter of August 21 regarding the series of incidents stretching from Oklahoma to Nebraska in which cattle were dismembered in some type of strange witchcraft cult,” Curtis wrote. “I wonder if your good offices have instigated an investigation into this situation in Nebraska or any of the other states experiencing similar acts of livestock mutilation.”

The FBI director responded on September 10, 1974, that he had had an agent investigate the matter and that it appeared “no federal law had been violated within the jurisdiction of the FBI.”

In 1979, Senator Harrison Schmitt of New Mexico succeeded in getting the Senate Appropriations Committee to include in its report language directing the FBI to “continue its investigation of cattle mutilations that have occurred in New Mexico and elsewhere.”

Retired FBI agent Kenneth Rommel led an investigation into mutilated cattle on a native reservation in New Mexico and concluded that predators were to blame.

“Most credible sources have attributed this damage to normal predator and scavenger activity. However, certain segments of the population have attributed the damage to other causes ranging from UFOs to a gigantic government conspiracy,” Rommel wrote in a letter to the FBI on March 5, 1980. “No factual data has been provided to support these theories.”

Rommel sent flakes of material that appeared on top of a Taos, New Mexico. van in July 1978 after a UFO allegedly hovered over it. The FBI laboratory concluded that it was white enamel paint, typical of exterior house paint, and that the particles “appear to have originated from a wood substrate.”

Predator’s conclusion is ‘invalid’

Hysell said he did not accept the FBI’s conclusion about predators.

“I never met many FBI agents who knew much about predators, at least the four-legged ones,” he said. “I totally thought that conclusion was invalid.”

Hysell said he suspected the government was involved in the mutilations possibly due to a chemical or biological accident and needed to conduct tests to see how widespread the material had spread.

“There were mutilations of any place where air, water or food could enter or leave the bodies,” he said.

An article in the Casper Star-Tribune on October 23, 1977, quoted a spokesman for the National Cattlemen’s Association as estimating that 3,000 mutilations had been reported in 22 states from late 1974 to a peak in the summers of 1975 and 1976.

One facility in Utah known to be involved in chemical and biological weapons is the Dugway Proving Ground, located 85 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah.

A Congressional report by the Veterans Affairs Committee and Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV on December 8, 1994 stated that the proving ground had been the site of testing of various chemical and biological agents.

In 1968, the report stated that 6,400 sheep near the facility died after “the intentional release of a deadly nerve gas from an aircraft.”

“Initially, the Department of Defense denied any responsibility for the accident… However, the VX nerve agent was identified when the poisoned sheep were autopsied, making it clear that the deaths were not caused by pesticides,” it states. the report. “Ultimately, the Department of Defense reimbursed the ranchers for their animals.”

‘Mock tests’

After the 1968 deaths, the report stated that the Department of Defense developed “simulator” tests. But during “45 years” of outdoor testing, “the Army stopped using a variety of simulants when it realized they were not as safe as believed,” the report states.

While the mass mutilations of the mid-1970s have ceased, reports of similar mutilations still occur. One of the most recent reports involved six cattle mutilations in Texas.

A May 23, 2023 press release from the Animal Legal Defense Fund reported that a 6-year-old longhorn crossbred cow was discovered in Madison County in April 2023 with its tongue removed by a “cut straight and clean with apparent precision along the jaw line. The scavengers did not touch the body.

Five more cows that had their anuses and sexual organs removed, as well as their tongues, were discovered in neighboring Brazos and Robertson counties.

The Madison County incident investigator told Cowboy State Daily she could not speak to the media without the sheriff’s approval. A message left with the sheriff was not returned by deadline.

As Hysell remembers the mid-1970s and collaborating with sheriff’s departments across the West, he remembers many people being “ridiculed” while trying to find answers.

“I felt like they were controlling us with the news,” he said. “I will tell you this in at least one case, I will not tell you what state it was in, a person who worked in the crime laboratory was told to leave, that they would not accept any more samples. and they had to keep quiet.”

Dale Killingbeck can be reached [email protected].