Unsolved Mysteries Season 5 Episode 3

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00:00I've been ranching in the cow business since I got out of school, so 25 years.
00:29It's a hard way to make a living, but I like the freedom.
00:33You know, we live in a really remote spot, not a lot of people around here, and we like
00:38it that way.
00:42I think the first time that I ever heard about cattle mutilations was way back in high school
00:47or something.
00:48When you hear that kind of stuff, you just, you kind of just write it off.
00:53You don't really believe it.
00:56You just don't think that's going to really happen to us.
00:59It was early June of 2021.
01:07We had a heifer.
01:10She wasn't acting right, and we trailed her two miles, but she was acting odd.
01:17As they were gathering heifers, she was falling to the back, and she was the last one through
01:22the gate.
01:24So I figured we'd go check on her in a day or two and see what's going on.
01:33Next morning, I got in the pickup, drove over the hill to that part of the ranch to go look
01:39at the heifer.
01:45That heifer was laying right up here dead and mutilated.
01:51Literally right here in the middle of where this green patch is.
01:57In fact, there's still a few bones in here.
02:01The heifer was laying right here on her right side, and her face was skinned back.
02:08Her tongue was removed, and she had a large straight cut, probably a couple feet right
02:16behind her shoulder here, and the hide was pulled back.
02:21I was taken aback.
02:23I've never seen anything like that ever.
02:26There was zero tracks anywhere.
02:30There was no noticeable blood anywhere around the animal, and no sign of a struggle.
02:36Another thing, so often if you find something dead, I mean, unless you're on it in the first
02:41few hours, usually some scavengers, you know, crows, ravens, magpies, coyotes, vultures
02:48have been on it, but this heifer that was mutilated, nothing would eat her.
02:53Nothing wanted to touch her, and it just got the wheels turning a little bit, like maybe
02:59she'd been darted or something.
03:03I don't know what kind of drug or whatever else you maybe would have to have in that
03:09But that heifer was acting strange.
03:15One of the most troubling things about that mutilation is where it happened.
03:20I mean, this is nowhere that's easy to get to.
03:24We take those cattle three miles across the ranch, through canyons, over ridges, everything
03:29else.
03:30How did anybody even know there were going to be cattle there that day?
03:34Nobody knew that.
03:35So did they follow our cowboys?
03:38That was strange.
03:41We know she was alive at 1230 in the afternoon, and we know she was dead at six o'clock the
03:45next morning.
03:47And what happened in between, I don't know.
03:54It was odd enough that I called our county sheriff.
03:57They performed their investigation and called me that evening and said, we've determined
04:06that that heifer was killed by a bear.
04:11And I said, a bear?
04:14I mean, we've never had anything killed by a bear ever.
04:19We do have bears around here, but it was this almost surgical cut for, I mean, it's like
04:24a two-foot cut and in a perfectly straight line right behind their shoulder.
04:32Last I checked, don't pack knives.
04:49My name's Matt Carter.
04:50I'm a rancher in eastern Oregon.
04:53The first time I heard about cattle mutilations was from an old friend of mine who had told
04:58me that he'd heard about them even back in the 70s.
05:06And I thought, eh, that's kind of odd, but not too worried about it.
05:14Then in August of 2020, I went down to the south side of the ranch, and I saw this cow
05:21laying over by a water trough.
05:24And just from afar, it didn't look natural.
05:29Right here is where that cow was dead and mutilated.
05:35Her upper lip was cut off, and her tongue was gone, and her intestines were sticking
05:41out between her hind legs.
05:44The scene was odd because there were no signs of any struggle of any sort.
05:52When I was sure myself that it was a mutilated cow, I thought, well, it's pretty close to
06:01home now.
06:02It's happened to me, which you never think it's going to, you know, until it does.
06:10In the winter of 2022, we had another mutilation.
06:14It's just less than a half mile from the house.
06:19That bull was dead right here, no sign of struggle or anything.
06:23There was next to no blood on the ground here.
06:26No sign of foul play other than it was mutilated.
06:30At the scene of the crime, we had probably over two feet of snow on the ground then.
06:36I looked for tracks, you know, I walked out in the snow all the way around, couldn't see
06:41any tracks of any sort.
06:43There was no way anybody could have got in here without leaving tracks.
06:47I called the state police and they came out, walked around out there, made a big circle
06:52out around and he didn't find any tracks.
06:56None of the authorities I talked to ever thought it was any kind of a predator attack or kill.
07:05They wouldn't say what it was because there's no evidence.
07:09It was just really odd.
07:17My name is Jeremiah Holmes.
07:28I work for the Wheeler County Sheriff's Office.
07:31We've had five confirmed mutilations in the county since 2019.
07:41One of them was in July of 2020.
07:44I got a phone call from a rancher.
07:47He was baffled by what he saw, much like most people are.
07:51He didn't want people to think he was weird or strange or something for calling it in.
08:00There was a cow laying underneath a juniper tree and her head was five, six inches off
08:05the ground.
08:07From a distance, she looked like she was probably a sick cow.
08:11And we get up there and she's dead.
08:14Her tongue was gone.
08:15The reproductive tracks that they could get to were gone.
08:18It was eerie.
08:20I have never seen a cow with its head off the ground in a rigor mortis type stage like
08:26that ever.
08:27I took a few photos and wrote it up and documented it as well, but I have no way to explain it.
08:35I'm absolutely convinced it's not predators.
08:38Predators are going to go to the soft tissue, but they're not going to do it with precision.
08:43And so when you start talking about mutilations, it's a mystery.
08:49It's that invasion of somebody coming and killing an animal on your property and you
08:56can't put a finger on who it is.
08:59You're just kind of on edge because you don't have a clue really what you're dealing with.
09:14My name is Steven Allen.
09:16I'm the publisher and editor of the Times Journal newspaper here in Condon, Oregon.
09:23When I heard about the first cattle mutilated in Wheeler County in December of 2019, honestly,
09:29I didn't know what to think.
09:32I'm not a cattle guy, but it was really when I first talked to Deputy Jeremiah Holmes that
09:39I started to feel like something was going on here, that something was happening to the
09:44livestock in the area.
09:48There were some people who were scared and people who I think normally aren't scared.
09:52They were shook and they told me, don't stop.
09:55You got to keep asking questions.
09:56You got to find out what's going on.
10:06It was March 22nd, 2020.
10:10My grandson and I went out.
10:11It was the last week of elk season and I drove up on this bull.
10:16Bull was laying on his side.
10:18He just, poof, he was over.
10:21Hadn't moved, which that was immediately strange.
10:27Big chunk of skin removed from his belly all the way back up to his rectum.
10:34I've seen a lot of stuff.
10:35I've never seen anything like it, really haven't.
10:39There was just something really strange about the whole deal.
10:43When I really started looking at the situation, the creeps kind of got to me.
10:48Still, my hair will stand up on the back of my neck when I drive by that spot.
11:03The first time I heard about a cattle mutilation was in the late 70s.
11:08My dad worked for the Department of Agriculture.
11:12I can remember dad talking about them.
11:15Everybody was, oh shit, what happened?
11:18You know, I mean, it was a big deal.
11:23I can remember him scratching his head and wanted to know why somebody would do that
11:28to a cow.
11:37The first one that I found was really something.
11:43I see her laying there, so when I walked up there and I just kind of stood there in shock
11:47because she was mutilated, I actually couldn't believe it.
11:50That's what I'd actually seen.
11:53There's no reason she should be dead.
11:56She's a perfectly healthy cow.
11:58They had taken her lips and her tongue, her cheeks.
12:03The vulva was cut out of her in a perfect circle.
12:07Straight lines, no jagged, ragged, I mean, just to a T.
12:12I thought, Jesus Christ, what the hell happened?
12:16And the more you look at it, the more bizarre it comes, because it's so precise.
12:26In the cow business, there's absolutely no way to prevent death.
12:31You're going to have some death loss, whether it's a sickness, a broken leg, but mutilation,
12:38that's different.
12:40That's some sick, twisted stuff.
12:50My name is Julie Sperry.
12:52I am a veterinarian based out of Gardner, Colorado.
12:56As a bovine veterinarian, I work with cattle ranchers to keep all of the cows, calves and
13:03bulls healthy.
13:07When I had seen reports of cattle mutilation on the news before, I had at first poo-pooed
13:13it because the genitalia and the rectums is kind of a predatory scavenger type thing,
13:22but then you add in the tongue and predators won't touch that.
13:28I got to thinking that maybe there really was something to the cattle mutilations and
13:32that it wasn't predators.
13:36This past spring, I got a phone call about a cow that had died and the owner wanted a
13:43necropsy done to see why she died because she was a young, healthy cow.
13:49There was really nothing that pointed to any reason why this cow died.
13:55After I had looked in her abdomen and chest, I went to grab for her tongue so I could open
14:01her mouth better.
14:02It was very easy to use that for leverage and there wasn't much tongue left.
14:08There was no way any predator could have gotten in there to get to it because rigor had set
14:12in and her jaw was clamped shut.
14:18All of my medical training cannot point to why this cow died and no amount of research,
14:27tissue, blood is going to tell us anything other than what I saw with my naked eye, which
14:34was nothing.
14:38As far as what or who are mutilating these cows, I honestly have no idea because it's
14:47like nothing that I have ever seen before.
14:51I really wish I had an answer.
14:57My name is Christopher O'Brien, I've been an unexplained livestock death investigator
15:03for over 30 years and I've investigated over 200 cases.
15:10It's horrifying what I've seen.
15:13The cattle mutilation mystery is by far the scariest phenomenon and very, very few people
15:20take it upon themselves to investigate cases of this type.
15:24Okay, this is a pretty precise triangular cut.
15:29That cut does look a little suspect.
15:31Okay, we see obvious cookie cutter incisions.
15:35I mean, phenomenal.
15:37Go ahead, tell me the coyotes did that.
15:42We have cases for mutilating livestock that have been documented to go back to the reign
15:47of James I in England in 1606.
15:51But all these prior cases really did not gain any sort of international notoriety.
15:58These were all local curiosities, but when Snippy happened in 1967, this became an international
16:06news story.
16:09Snippy was a horse living in the San Luis Valley in Colorado and she was found dead.
16:16The spinal cord was missing from within the spine with no apparent way into the spinal
16:22cord channel from either the top or the bottom.
16:26The brain was gone without a break into the cranium and the upper respiratory organs were
16:31gone.
16:33The family, of course, was very freaked out by this.
16:37Laying on its side like it had just dropped over while it was running, except for the
16:42fact that from here up, all of the skin, tissue, everything was stripped from that
16:48horse's head.
16:50The Snippy crime scene was highly unusual.
16:54Normally if a horse is found denuded of flesh from its shoulders to its neck, you'd have
16:58tissue and blood and body fluids around and none of this is present at the site.
17:07And they did a really intensive survey of the area there.
17:10They found that she had pranced around in two or three circles before then being found
17:19100 feet away from where her tracks were.
17:22That gave the appearance that maybe something aerial had been stalking her.
17:30My mother turned around to me and she said, Nellie's horse got killed by a flying saucer
17:35last night.
17:38We do have a well-documented wave of UFO activity that was going on at the time of the Snippy
17:46case, the late summer, fall of 1967.
17:50You have a bunch of sightings that are occurring in Colorado.
17:55People lining up the roadways with picnic lunches waiting for the UFOs to come out.
17:59I mean, it was a big deal.
18:01And then to have the Snippy case occur, it's almost impossible not to equate one with the
18:06other.
18:08And from then on, the mutilations jumped into high gear.
18:13In 1973, all hell broke loose.
18:17Mutilations occurred and by the end of the year, I think it was 14 states at that point
18:21that had reported mutilation cases.
18:24Three dead cows lying in a straight line 150 yards apart, their eyes, tongues, and sex
18:30organs cut out with laser-like precision.
18:33New Mexico was one of the states that was really hit the hardest.
18:37And there was over 150, I think, mutilations in a four or five year period in the late 70s.
18:45And by this point, thousands of animals had been reported mutilated.
18:55I think a number that's commonly used and referred to is in the United States and Canada,
19:02there have been about 10,000 cases.
19:04We're probably only seeing the tip of the iceberg, probably many more cases occurred.
19:08My personal feeling is only one in 10 mutilations actually get reported to law enforcement.
19:17Ranchers are typically pretty private people.
19:19They also take their work very seriously.
19:22So when they start to lose animals, it's also a bit of a source of pride.
19:27And so I don't think they like a lot of people knowing that they've had a death in their herd.
19:31So you don't know how many are not reported.
19:37A classic mutilation by investigators' definition would be the flesh taken off the jaw with
19:43a jawbone polished white.
19:46Usually the tongue is taken out.
19:48It's very, very difficult to do surgically.
19:52Oftentimes an ear is missing, an eye.
19:55The animal's reproductive organs are popped out.
19:58But if the blood is missing, that's the telltale sign for a classic mutilation.
20:04I couldn't find any blood anywhere.
20:05No puddle of blood, no nothing, just a dead cow.
20:09There was no blood.
20:11Typically when there's a dead animal, it's a bit of a scene.
20:13I mean, it looks like a crime scene.
20:15There's blood everywhere.
20:16And we're talking about a cow or bull.
20:19There's up to 13 gallons of blood that could be lost, and there's nothing on the ground.
20:24It'd be a bloody mess, absolutely.
20:26And there was no blood where our heifer was laying there dead.
20:29The most puzzling aspect of this case was I couldn't figure out why there wasn't more
20:34blood from the mutilation.
20:36There would have been blood all over the place.
20:39It's just bizarre.
20:40I mean, it's so bizarre, this stuff.
20:42It's hard to wrap your head around.
20:43It doesn't make sense to me, and I don't understand it.
20:47No rancher has been harder hit than Eli Ronnich.
20:50Fourteen of his cows have been mutilated.
20:53A pathologist concluded the cuts were made by, quote, the application of high temperature
20:59as a dissecting process.
21:10When it comes to investigating, we're literally looking for anything, but tracks are number
21:16one, trying to find evidence of how somebody got in there.
21:20I found absolutely no tracks at all.
21:25The fact there was lack of tracks and stuff just really made my hair stand up on end.
21:33And that takes a lot for me.
21:38The fences aren't cut.
21:40Grass isn't tromped over where somebody walked through it.
21:43Nothing.
21:44Nothing.
21:46No footprints, no four-wheeler tracks, no pickup tracks.
21:52And then I'd say the other thing, whoever's doing the mutilation, I don't know how they
21:57get the cattle incapacitated to where they can work on them.
22:00There's been a lot of discrepancies and thoughts of how these animals are getting killed.
22:06You know, we're not finding any gunshots, any bullet holes.
22:12I know how powerful cattle are.
22:14They're strong.
22:15I mean, we had a bull weighed over 2,000 pounds.
22:19There's just no way five or six people could even think of taking one down.
22:24It's a lot of animal to just plop over on your side and not leave a mark anywhere.
22:33Cattle are a prey animal, so they are ever vigilant about what's around them.
22:41You rarely can sneak up on one.
22:46You don't just walk up to a big healthy animal like this and tell it to lay down.
22:50You know, you've got to do something to it.
22:52So it'd have to have been some kind of a dart or sleeping thing to make it fall.
23:00There's dart guns out there today that individuals use for doctoring animals.
23:05Are you dealing with some kind of a coagulant that, you know, the blood coagulates in an
23:11instant and that animal freezes in its tracks?
23:16Somebody had to have tranquilized her and then give her a shot of that stuff that coagulates
23:21your blood because there was no bullet holes, no nothing.
23:28One of the ingenious elements of this whole mystery is the animal usually lays in the
23:33environment for at least three or four days before it's even discovered.
23:37When you have an animal that's been dead for four, five, six days, any attempt for like
23:42blood draws or anything like that are done.
23:45You're not going to find anything in the blood or tissue samples.
23:48Any drugs in the system would have been long gone.
23:51I honestly didn't know what to sample.
23:55It's not something that is probably going to be worth anything anymore because the blood
24:00has already started to degrade.
24:03We took some tissue samples, but by the time the samples get there, they're rotten.
24:08And so they can't find anything about cause of death.
24:13No reasonable person can sit here and comprehend why someone or some group of individuals would
24:20want these body parts from these animals.
24:23It's just a senseless crime.
24:24You know, it's just something that isn't conducive to common reasoning.
24:32I wouldn't have a clue what a motive would be.
24:36In the days of when the buffalo roamed the country, the buffalo hiders, one of the things
24:41that they did, they took the tongues.
24:43The tongues were kind of a delicacy on the buffalo.
24:48There's no value to any of the parts.
24:52You go to a meat market and you can buy a tongue, but it's a $10 or $15 item maybe.
24:58The reproductive organs have no real value.
25:03Why would anybody want those kind of things other than it's for some kind of ritual or
25:09something?
25:10Roving bands of shadowy Satan worshipers are frequently mentioned as possible culprits
25:15in the mutilations.
25:16There's a lot of folks that believe it's a cult.
25:18There's a lot of them.
25:19David's getting ready to make a sacrifice, I think, to the devil over that red moon.
25:26I think there's ritualistic and blood sacrifice written all over this mystery.
25:32It's the only blood-based paranormal phenomenon, and it's the one that leaves behind the most
25:37physical evidence.
25:40So that fact alone gives it a veneer of almost an evil, sort of predatory, occultish kind
25:49of feel to it.
25:51Now police have been skeptical when investigating these acts, just as we are in reporting them.
25:56But there is no question that something is going on out there.
25:59Okay, just a little date ID check.
26:02It's May 4th, 1998, 1155 in the morning.
26:08Got this call from June Walkley and her husband Virgil, and they spotted this animal that
26:14they said looked like it had been dropped on the fence.
26:18Another thing that's interesting as well is sometimes there's evidence of the animal being
26:23dropped from a height.
26:25Horns broken off, heads twisted in an unnatural way, clamp marks on the back like it had been
26:31picked up and dropped, spines with all the ribs broken off right on the spine like it
26:37had been dropped from great height and snapped all the ribs.
26:40So it does appear that these animals are being picked up, taken somewhere, experimented on,
26:47and then brought back and dropped in a different place in the pasture than where they were
26:51picked up.
26:53We've had cases that cows have ended up five pastures away from where they were originally
26:58supposed to be, up to two, three, four, even seven miles away.
27:03Who's doing this?
27:06I don't know.
27:07But they definitely have their modus operandi dialed in.
27:15Cows investigations have found an unusually high correlation between mutilations and UFO
27:21sightings.
27:22I've had two ranchers tell me off the record that the only thing they can think of is UFOs.
27:29I've also had people who live in these very remote places tell me that they have seen
27:33UFOs.
27:35One thing that, you know, you hear about this stuff is aliens.
27:38I personally don't believe that.
27:40I believe this is being done by people.
27:44It pisses me off.
27:46You're stealing.
27:47It's theft.
27:49In any other business, when you steal from somebody, there's consequences for that.
27:55In a state where cattle are a billion dollar industry, theories about the mutilations almost
27:59outnumber the ranchers who talk about them.
28:02Some think the criminals come by helicopter, flying through the night, descending on herds,
28:07helicopters bearing men with poison darts, or perhaps military men trying out a new chemical.
28:15In the 70s, we have sightings in Colorado where groups of as many as seven helicopters
28:22are seen harassing cattle herds.
28:26These helicopter sightings, when you start adding them up, there's at least 350, 400
28:31of them.
28:32Documented sightings of helicopters in and around mutilation sites, mostly afterwards.
28:40The fact that these government helicopters, we're assuming, are being seen suggests that
28:46there may be some sort of official sanctioned government program going on.
28:53What are they doing?
28:56The possibility of a group of people doing this seems to be the one that law enforcement
29:02has taken the most seriously.
29:05I wonder if it's a serial killer group or some kind of group that's capable of doing
29:11something like this.
29:13Some of the greatest serial killers in the world eventually made a mistake.
29:17They left something and they were discovered.
29:21I think if it was two or three guys or a colt, I think that something would be found by now.
29:30It's got to be multi-generational because we've been dealing with this now for 40, 50,
29:3560 years.
29:36So it's not just one group of people that were doing this.
29:40That's always been one of the stumbling blocks for this.
29:43How come they haven't opened up and why don't we have a whistleblower?
29:47Why don't we have somebody that's come forward?
29:51Mutilation of a cow or a bull is a crime.
29:53It is something that's serious and it's an animal this time.
29:59But what happens if ranchers' kids are out there on a four-wheeler or something and they
30:03run across somebody that's causing this?
30:06Are they going to take somebody's life in addition to that?
30:10Our bull got mutilated within a half mile of our house.
30:15It's really troubling to think that somebody would come within that close of the house
30:22and kill something.
30:25And who knows if somebody's demented enough to come on the ranch and kill and mutilate
30:32a bull or a cow, what's going to keep them from coming in the house and killing somebody?
30:39That night, my daughter was home alone.
30:43You know, you think you're safe living way out of town, way out here at the end of the
30:47road and you just don't know that you are.
30:52I think there is a real concern of what might be out there.
30:55The mystery just kind of continues to grow.
30:58Well, tonight, authorities north of Houston are investigating the mysterious death of
31:01six cattle found with their tongues removed, but no blood spilled.
31:06I know that there's a lot of cases happening in Texas right now.
31:10Investigators say the cows' remains weren't even scavenged by other animals.
31:14An expert we spoke to says that's just unusual.
31:20The Oregon cases that happened in 2018 through 2021 were maybe just a presage to a new wave
31:27that we have developing in light of these new Texas cases that have been reported, which
31:31may number around a dozen now, the Texas cases.
31:36They all have been described as being classic mutilations, and they've all appeared to be
31:41north of Houston and southeast Texas.
31:46The Animal Legal Defense Fund has now stepped in and is offering a reward for information
31:50leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or people responsible.
31:55Cattles in Texas are very, very tight-lipped and have not allowed any, to my knowledge,
32:01any information out about the nature of these cases.
32:05It is frustrating because I want answers.
32:15If we start looking at collaborating and coming up with some kind of a group idea on how to
32:21investigate these, get some sort of a data system or something where we can see what's
32:27going on in other counties and see the reports, I think that there's a better chance of getting
32:33some kind of closure.
32:35Authorities in at least four counties across southeast Texas investigating these cases,
32:39all very similar.
32:41So far, no arrests have been made.
32:42If you have any information, call police.
32:45We want to get that information out there because for every one that's lost here, there's
32:50how many more lost in other states, other counties.
32:55I hope if there's anybody out there with any factual leads that would put us in the right
33:02path of solving what's going on, that they would reach out so we can get this behind
33:07us or at least know what we're dealing with so that we know how to prevent it.
33:18I think the unknown is probably the thing that's the most unnerving, is because there's
33:22no answer.
33:26You know, maybe this is all just some sort of weird, trickster-ish joke that's being
33:30played on humanity.
33:35The kinds of people that are out there that are capable of doing something like this,
33:39the kinds of beings that are out there capable of doing something like this, I don't know.
33:44That is the mystery.
33:49I do believe it's done by something superior to our way of thinking.
33:54It's got to be some grand experiment of some sort.
33:59And what that is, I don't know.