Content Warning: This episode contains frank discussion of animal death, carcass predation, and graphic descriptions of animal mutilation. Listener discretion is advised.

Blake and Karen continue their conversation with religious studies scholar Lee Weiss on the cattle mutilation mystery. If you missed part one, wind your podcast player back an episode – this one picks up right where the panic peaked. At the center of part two is Emmy Award-winning reporter Linda Moulton Howe, whose 1980 documentary A Strange Harvest wrapped a decade of dead cows, black helicopters, and hypnotic regressions into a single package and delivered it to America.

Lee walks through what happened next: the government’s Rommel Report and its verdict of “Mother Nature,” the tragic Bennewitz affair, cow parts arriving by mail in Alberta, a declassified CIA remote-viewing file, and how the whole phenomenon finally hardened into alien orthodoxy. It all ends with the big question – what’s actually killing these animals?

Episode LinksA Strange Harvest (1980)– watch a pristine copy of Linda Moulton Howe’s documentary on Archive.org, along with its 1993 sequel Strange Harvests
Linda Moulton Howe– the Emmy Award-winning Denver reporter who became “the dead cow lady”
Cattle Mutilation– Wikipedia’s overview, including details of the Rommel Report (Operation Animal Mutilation, 1980)
The FBI’s Animal Mutilation Files– the declassified records that first drew Lee into this topic
Paul Bennewitz– the businessman at the center of a genuine government disinformation campaign (a future MonsterTalk episode, Blake promises)
The Gold Key comics version of the ‘Snippy’ storyvia Archive.org
Dulce Base– the legendary underground alien base of northern New Mexico
Senator Harrison Schmitt– the astronaut-senator who convened the 1979 Albuquerque conference on the mutilations
Ed Sanders– the beat writer and Manson family chronicler who penned one of the first major mutilation articles
R. Leo Sprinkle– the University of Wyoming psychologist whose hypnotic regression appears in A Strange Harvest (papers held at UW’s American Heritage Center)
Bill Cooper– the Pale Horse conspiracist Howe crossed paths with
Art Bell– whose Bigelow-sponsored Area 2000 featured Howe’s segments before Coast to Coast AM
Robert BigelowandNIDS– whose 1990s investigations included the prion disease conspiracy theory
The Stargate Project– the CIA remote-viewing program whose Sunstreak files contained Lee’s strangest find
Endangered Species (1982)– the mainstream movie cash-in that nobody on the panel recommends
Procedures for Evaluating Predation on Livestock and Wildlife– the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension manual Lee recommends to anyone serious about the topic

The Ick-o-Meter: A Strange Harvest (1980)The Ick-o-MeterQuantifying the gross in Linda Moulton Howe’s A Strange Harvest (1980) · a MonsterTalk investigation · hover over any bar for details

Total icky hits316 Ick density4.3% of words “Mutilation” rate1 per 52 secIcky terms and concepts, rankedIck over time (hits per 5-minute segment)Method: full transcript (7,285 words, ~57 min) parsed by caption; exact word and phrase matching per category. The “body part removed / missing” concept counts “removed,” “missing,” “gone,” or “taken” only when a body part appears in the same caption, to exclude phrases like “mutilations had gone away.” Compiled for MonsterTalk S05E39-40, “Strange Harvest: The Cattle Mutilation Mystery.”

Crowdsourcing CornerLee is looking for leads on Project Sunstreak – the CIA remote-viewing subproject whose declassified files inexplicably involve images of mutilated cattle – along with any other cattle mutilation ephemera, and an introduction to Linda Moulton Howe if you can manage one. Reach him here: (laweiss1991@gmail.com).

About Our GuestLee Weiss is a religious studies scholar researching mass paranormal and psychogenic events, including the cattle mutilation phenomenon and its religious dimensions.

Lee Weiss on Academia.edu
Of Gods and Monsters Conference (2019)– where Blake and Lee first met
Gods and Monsters 2 (2026)– where they renewed the acquaintance
Religion, Culture, and the Monstrous– the academic volume featuring contributions from both Blake and Lee

Check out Lee’s writing at his Substack

PromotionsCheck out Karen’s bookBeyond Words.

SEO TranscriptThis is not a fully accurate transcript, and was machine generated. It’s here for helping search engines find the episode but not intended to be a faithful transcript of the episode. (But it’s not AWFUL.) Some of the material in this transcript only exists in the Patreon/Premium edition of the show and was excised for the commercial version.

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It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant, hairy creature.
Part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24 mile long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland.
It’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
This is part two of our look at cattle mutilations with religious studies scholar Lee Weiss.
I would recommend checking out part one if you missed it, since we’re continuing a conversation and you’ll be joining in medias res.
Pretty much just like the Odyssey in that respect.
I mean, the poem, not the movie.
Well, I mean, I say not the movie.
I haven’t seen the movie.
But look, can we just get on with this intro?
I didn’t want to sidetrack our discussion, but we briefly talk about UFO comics in this episode, and two of my most vivid 1970s weird shit moments are watching Jack Webb’s produced TV show Project UFO and buying one of these gold key UFO comics off the black metal spinning comic book rack at the drugstore next to my pediatrician’s office.
When I recently discovered that these Gold Key comics are available on the Internet Archive, I had to go look that issue up and was delighted to see that my recollections about the content match the actual book.
We do talk a lot about how fallible human memory is, but sometimes it can be rewardingly accurate.
And the older I get, the more pleased I am when any of the dusty garbage in my head turns out to be based on a true story.
The point is that you’ll find a link to those comics in the show notes along with links to Emmy award-winning Linda Moulton Howell’s documentary Strange Harvest.
I know skeptics and believers won’t always agree on what’s behind these stories, but at least we’re able to go review the same source material for how these ideas propagated out into the wider world back in ye olde groovy disco days.
And this series sure would be improved by a follow-up deep dive into taphonomy, wouldn’t it?
Because skeptics will tell you that every one of these dead animals had its own cause, it’s better if we do take a little trip down to Funimilane soon and learn how various factors change the forms of animals when they die.
Whether it’s predators or humans or disease or accidents, what happens next is fascinating and follows some predictable patterns.
This has led to insights useful in forensics, and some of these patterns are so predictable that they become evidence suitable for helping determine guilt or innocence in court cases.
It’s nasty and disgusting and also fascinating, which sounds a bit like how my wife describes me, but that’s a different story.
Besides, as useful a tool as it is for helping skeptics win arguments, these wounds were not caused by Occam’s razor.
Monster Talk.
We’re joined again by Lee Weiss this week, and we’re discussing animal mutilations.
If you haven’t heard part one, you need to get back into your podcast and wind back to last week and get part one.
But one person hits the scene, and I think she manages to take one hour of television and stick all of this candy into one beautiful big wrapper, which I admit I knew about for decades, but only watched…
uh last night in preparation for this show i finally sat down and watched the whole thing uh for listeners there’ll be a link in the show notes there is a beautiful pristine copy of this film on archive.org you can download and watch or just watch streaming um i’m not gonna say it is the height of journalism but um after this film she does become not linda moulton howe but emmy award-winning linda moulton howe linda moulton how emmy award-winning uh
Well, reporter, I guess.
Linda, how should I introduce you?
I always lose track.
Emmy-winning, I know you’ve done documentaries, right?
Or maybe an Emmy award-winning TV producer and author.
But all of that’s so hard to say.
So all of that, Linda Howe.
Of course, Emmy award-winning Linda Howe coming up here in just a few moments.
Usual Linda Moulton Howe, investigator, Emmy award-winning documentary producer.
and general scientific reporter for this program.
Linda Moulton Howe, Emmy Award-winning documentary producer, investigator of crop circles and animal mutilation.
The documentary Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist looking into crop circles, animal mutilations, and stuff going on in Puerto Rico.
Linda Howe, who is…
an investigative journalist actually emmy award-winning producer linda howe is an emmy award-winning television producer writer and researcher of earth mysteries linked to non-human intelligences we’re talking about strange harvest can you can you tell us a little bit about this film i it’s
Yes.
I rewatched it recently, too, and it holds up.
I know you’re familiar with In Search Of.
Did someone say In Search Of?
If you loved In Search Of, you should check out another fine Monster House production, In Research Of, with myself, Blake Smith, and Dr. Jeb Card.
In Research Of, we’ll talk and have some fun.
We share ideas, but not the only ones.
We’ll share the facts that we show sometimes last.
I.R.O.
In each episode, we take a 22-minute episode of In Search Of and add information that the producers didn’t or couldn’t include.
Check TV listings in your podcast market.
It’s got these beautiful 70s.
I mean, it’s 1980, but it’s still got these beautiful 70s vibes.
And it’s kind of where what becomes now, I think, effectively the orthodox explanation for the cattle mutilation phenomena becomes crystallized.
Now, really, before this, it had all, I mean, again, we talked about this since Snippy, it had been associated with aliens.
And by 76, the Snippy story is popularly associated with UFOs in…
comic books for children.
The illustrations are great.
Some of the images in this comic book are just, I mean, they’re astonishing.
And they do cover all of these true UFO stories from the golden age of UFOs with these just beautiful, like, Silver Age comic illustrations.
And you get to see the horse get zapped just in eight different issues.
But while it had always been this kind of, one of the theories, there’s still this skepticism, like,
The early investigators are still trying, the 70s investigators are still promoting a vision of, well, it could be a government conspiracy.
It could be something else.
It could be the satanic cults.
The satanic cult theory goes throughout the 70s.
And there’s a lot of tangentially, there are better…
you know, agent to mutilate cattle ostensibly than UFOs on first glance, when you have like the Night Stalker going around, when you have the, one of the first great like articles on the cattle mutilation phenomena is by Ed Sanders, who was this beat writer who also wrote the first book on the Manson family.
And according to him, he got involved with this after writing his Manson family book and getting a tongue, a cow tongue mailed to him in the mail.
There’s a very strange account out of Canada in 1992.
This is just a side note, I’m sorry.
I’m just wondering if they lick the stamp themselves or use the cow tongue.
Sounds like voodoo to me.
A little bit, it’s odd.
But in 1992 in Edmonton, a number of residents of this town called Legal
received a series of cow parts in the mail over the course of a number of days so they just open up their mailboxes there’d be parts of cows in there cow tongues cow eyes something that came up but to circle back around to kind of what her documentary really does
These strands of both conspiratorial thinking and UFO thinking, that the cause of this is either space aliens or some kind of conspiracy, they’d been in the community a long time, but there was still this attempt through the 70s, most of the investigators are trying to at least…
They all have their pet theories, and I think secretly most of them at the time really believed it was aliens from the beginning.
Gabe Valdez, I don’t think, did.
I think some of them really thought it was this…
Some military conspiracy or another.
Emmy award-winning TV producer and author.
Linda Moulton Howe, in her documentary… Emmy award-winning Linda Moulton Howe.
Emmy award-winning.
Emmy award-winning.
Who won’t return my emails.
Oh, no.
I’ll send her another one.
In this… She basically… And this goes out of…
It goes…
It is a like cult classic on cable television.
It gets like, I don’t know if it’s syndicated with documentaries, but it’s circulated quite regularly to the point that she updates it in the early 90s.
But it fuses these dimensions of there’s a government conspiracy and then also there’s this alien conspiracy.
She becomes quite fixated on this later on.
And I don’t know if we want to get into the Benowitz stuff or just kind of like simmer with the birth of the alien conspiracy.
The senator has this conference to kind of bring attention to this and invites both federal law enforcement people and also the nascent cattle mutilation investigation community.
And this is ostensibly where Benowitz gets brought into this scheme.
In our first episode, Lee, you were talking about copycat cases of this.
And I’m wondering when Strange Harvest came out, what effect this had on the spread of not only the belief in this, but also the phenomenon taking place.
So did this increase the amount of cases that were seen?
It’s an odd thing.
You would expect it to, but it doesn’t.
After, so her report comes out at the same time that this thing called her report, her documentary, comes out at the same time that the Ronald report comes out.
So this FBI agent, or at this point he was retired from the FBI, but he’s appointed to head this federal investigation into this.
Now, by this point, the FBI hadn’t been investigating this since 1976.
Not very extensively going by their records, which is how I initially got involved with this.
And all of the FBI’s records on cattle mutilation are readily available also on archives.org.
The Rommel Report interviews all these people and effectively concludes, no, it’s all natural causes.
It does weirdly highlight a number of cases that it says, well, this is anomalous, we can’t explain this, but then it doesn’t expand on that.
even though the cases don’t seem, it’s odd.
The whole thing is very odd.
And one does get the impression the federal government really is just trying to sweep it under the rug, which makes sense given the background and that it just is kind of annoying, like you can’t explain it.
But after 1980, the cases do drop off.
Now, there are still isolated accounts.
And these periodic breakouts.
And weirdly enough, right now, there’s a huge outbreak that’s been going on for years in Texas.
There’s, I think, another in New Mexico.
So they still reoccur post-1980.
But after the 70s, and particularly 75 and 76, it’s like, I mean, it gets so bad that they’re shooting at helicopters.
And like the…
like people are forming posses.
Wow.
It doesn’t ever get back to that point.
After 1980, the phenomena kind of… And what happens, I think… Emmy award-winning TV producer and author.
Linda Moulton Howe has some…
I love that.
I just say her whole name every time I reference her.
Yeah, one of those names.
For some reason, it is.
For real, yeah.
Well, I mean, she always, you know, on the Art Bell shows.
By the way, Art Bell before, if you go back to our archives, you can find after he passed, I did a tribute episode.
But before he did Coast to Coast, he did a show called Area 2000, which was entirely sponsored by Robert Bigelow.
And that show…
Emmy award winning TV producer and author.
Linda Moulton Howell already doing regular segments, very reminiscent of what became her Earth Files.
So that whole formula was there as a way.
And I didn’t really understand exactly what she was doing in the sense that she was a local reporter.
She did.
She got an Emmy for doing this coverage of this story.
And then that became her life.
Like her life became reporting on these strange things.
Like she didn’t go on to cover traffic reports or local political corruption.
Right.
No, it’s like she became the dead cow lady.
Right.
So.
she gets sucked straight into it um and again i think it’s something that hap similar would happen to benowitz it’s the same guy that they’re interacting with and i mean she was also interacting with i’m not gonna get in i’m not a my background is not in ufos but um like she was interacting with uh bill cooper before his death um so she i think she they get to her i think
The dead horse meets the pale horse.
I got it.
It’s quite an apropos.
She seems a lot less anti-Semitic than he was.
Thankfully, yeah.
Yeah, in her favor.
So I think one thing that happens with this documentary, and because at this point the cases are receding, people are reporting on them less.
And it really fully shifts just completely into the ETH, the alien hypothesis, and specifically the alien conspiracy sort of branch.
You don’t really, with one odd exception that I’ll talk about more a little bit later, Bigelow’s NIDS, they…
Because they also do a lot of cattle investigations in the 90s.
One of their teams really, really took seriously the medical conspiracy, like governments, like FDA, military, covering up a prion disease outbreak theory.
They had maps and graphs, and they have this whole claim that Alzheimer’s rates are being misreported.
but which is true.
And that what this is covering up is a wide scale outbreak of prion disease in the beef supply.
It’s a great conspiracy, right?
I mean, but it’s a really good one.
Yeah.
And in the UK, they were terrified of it and we didn’t want it to happen here.
So everybody, it just like, okay.
Oh no.
Another outbreak of Ebola has happened in Africa.
We’re like, oh, that’s terrible.
Is it coming here?
Because we matter, right?
Like that’s, it always comes back to, is it about us?
Is it about us?
Is it about us?
Fear.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So when I watched Strange Harvest last night, I was surprised.
I’m a little curious.
I was talking to Karen before the show.
It’s 57 minutes long.
And I didn’t know if it was originally a 90-minute documentary or if it was an hour, but they’ve extended it just a little bit to make it into a VHS or something.
So I wasn’t quite clear on that.
It was made for TV, and then she extends it with more footage later.
Okay, that fits.
I think in 88, the longer version, and then 93 is the sequel, which is Strange Harvests, which I still haven’t watched yet, but I just found out about it a few minutes ago.
Since our recording, I found a little more about the history of the documentaries we’re discussing.
It’s because there’s more than one Strange Harvest out there, and it gets confusing fast.
The original is A Strange Harvest, singular.
It aired May 25, 1980 as a 90-minute evening special on KMGH-TV, Channel 7, Denver.
It pulled the largest audience in that station’s history for a locally produced documentary, and it won Linda Moulton Howe a regional Emmy the following year in 1981.
Now, the version most people watch today, including the copy up on the Internet Archive, is not that original broadcast.
It’s a shorter reissue, running about 57 minutes, with new Howe narration bolted onto the front that references cattle mutilations as late as 1982.
It circulated on home video as you’ll see it dated to 1988 in some catalog listings.
And then, 13 years after the original, there’s a sequel, Strange Harvests, plural, with that S on the end.
That one came out in 1993.
It’s about an hour long and it revisits the same territory, animals still dying, light still in the sky.
It’s a separate film and it’s the one that trails off into the full alien conclusion.
So,
A Strange Harvest 1980 Emmy Award winner.
It’s recut home edition.
And then Strange Harvest, 1993, the follow-up.
Same story, three different packages.
And then to make it even more confusing, in 2024, a new film called Strange Harvest hit the indie film circuit.
You’ll see that one referred to as a mockumentary, but to be clear, it’s a horror film, not a comedy, so maybe pseudo-documentary is a less ambiguous label.
Anyway, it has nothing to do with animal mutilations.
It’s about a serial killer called Mr.
Shiny, and most importantly for our purposes,
is not related to the topic we’re discussing but in the end of that episode i was shocked to see leo sprinkle show up doing a hypnosis and a hypnotic regression now leo sprinkle if ufo people will know him as being a hypnotic regression uh ufo investigator from way back uh also from the colorado area karen and he was also involved sorry yeah he was also involved with stan roman x early from here yeah
So but they’re doing this again, just like on in search of they’re doing like it’s a dark room with brown walnut paneling.
And they’re asking this woman to recall these memories.
They’re quite traumatic.
I mean, it is it.
You know, it.
an early Cronenberg movie.
It looks like The Brood or Shivers.
In more ways than one.
There’s a guy in Scanners who looks a lot like Leo Sprinkle, but…
the the what surprised me was it starts out as a pretty straight documentary and then by the end of the thing it’s well this is either a government conspiracy or it’s aliens those are really the only two explanations that make any sense both yeah or both right or the governments are colluding with the aliens you know so right so
For her to have kept this same story going and the story itself to have evolved so little is surprising.
It’s almost like it rolled into its canonical version and just stuck, right?
So in a sense, I’m wondering if Strange Harvest sort of forms part of the canonical literature of the field.
I think so.
I think, and I think that’s the transition from, in the 70s, you really get some out there theories about what’s going on.
I mean, you get like new agers writing into Stigmata and proposing, well,
One really good one is that this is a mass, what’s the topa or a thought form that’s being manifested by the collective anxiety of the human race.
And what’s specifically…
the collective anxiety of America vis-a-vis the Soviet Union and the war.
And that it’s first preying on the cattle and that next it’s going to trigger some mass psychic event that will kill all of humanity.
It gets related to also like Soviet psychological operations.
I do have an odd digression
if any of your listeners want to help me with this.
Oh, crowdsourcing.
We love crowdsourcing.
While I was looking into the FBI files on this, I thought I would look into the declassified CIA files.
Do you know what Project Sunstreak is?
I do not.
Project Stargate?
I do know Project Stargate.
So it’s a subsidiary of that and had to deal with remote viewing.
Okay.
So it’s…
a little redacted.
It’s like one of their usual remote viewing reports.
The odd thing is that it seems to involve using images of mutilated cattle as an attempt to interfere with or block the remote viewer’s capabilities.
And it seems to imply that this could be used as defense against potential Soviet psychic spies that, well, perhaps we could use the American, like they would just, and it’s very, I don’t, again, it’s quite redacted.
Wait, like pictures of dead cows would block Soviet psychic spies?
That’s utter nonsense.
Oh, that’s a good one.
fitting that’s three now and what’s even stranger is for some reason they include in the declassified document this clipping about cattle mutilation reporting oh wow which and i and i’ve no there’s no reference in the it’s a very brief document none of the other ones
In case any of your listeners are believers in the government conspiracy, just to give them some more fuel.
What would they, what are you looking for?
And where would you like them to send information if they have the information to provide?
Up to that.
Oh, yeah.
I’ll put it at the end of the show.
I’ll put it in the show notes.
And if you have anything to contribute here or leads or just, you know.
Or any cattle mutilation.
Blassy pictures of dead cows, whatever.
If you can get me in touch with Linda, anything.
yeah that sounds good yeah we have one more pop culture thing i guess we should at least mention so we don’t get angry letters uh there was a mainstream movie about uh ostensibly ostensibly about cattle mutilations uh which is endangered species in 1982 if they aren’t stopped now there may be no hope for the future
Endangered species.
It’s not science fiction anymore.
I didn’t care for it.
It’s a dreadful movie.
Not even so bad as good.
It was just really not great.
Not really, no.
Definitely not.
It’s really, it’s also a strange mishmash.
It’s clearly like an odd cash-in, kind of late, like a late cash-in.
I think it’s more inspired by just like the sci-fi trend in late 70s, early 80s, like cinema.
And then there’s this like…
spoiler alert if anyone is planning on watching the movie.
Don’t.
Don’t.
I won’t.
The ending is that the government is conducting, I mean, it’s effectively the Valdez hypothesis, but the government is conducting secret tests and then they’re utilizing cattle in these tests.
Which is interesting.
So you see that even like up until like the 80s, the full like panoply of theories are still out there.
And some of them are still out there, like the satanic abuse theories and the ritual violence theories and the cult theories.
Those are still out there.
And ultimately those have the most quote unquote weight in terms of evidence.
people investigating it, I guess.
But the government theory outside of, you know, the alien, either that they’re at war with the aliens in an underground base, if you follow with like the…
Dolce.
Do you have more to say about Dolce?
I’m not the person to talk to about it.
But, I mean, it’s interesting that this phenomenon seems to touch, like, every inch of the American, like, paranormal landscape.
It touches almost every major, like, that’s why the Kennedy assassination.
It touches all of these major alien conspiracies, abduction conspiracies.
It’s basically barbecuing on.
well unfortunately we’ll need to start to wrap things up but uh i think we need to ask the big question what’s going on here what what is really behind all of this which we’ve touched upon
What’s actually happening?
Again, there are some strange outlier cases.
What’s actually happening to the cows, I think, is just a series of mostly natural events.
And I think anyone who is very serious about cattle mutilation, the two things they need to look at are…
There’s a great book that AgriLife Extension put out, Procedures for Evaluating Predation on Livestock and Wildlife.
That’s handy.
That’s a great title.
Yeah, it’s very easy to remember.
But it’s this manual for ranchers that just shows here are the usual signs of predation.
Now, I think what’s happening in the cases that get people really freaked out initially that start the outbreaks, people are stumbling upon animals that…
have a series of a series of different natural wounds that have for whatever reason either dried unusually there’s weather perhaps there’s predation after an initial predation so
coyotes get to something then cows cows then crows get to something so you could stumble across an animal that has its genitals ripped open but then also a single eye plucked out and you would think well coyotes don’t pluck out a single eye you could also stumble upon this animal three days later after ants had eaten it and after there had been some certain weather phenomena and then not only does it have these initial two unusual wounds but then it’s also got
strange sort of drawings of these patterns of predation that you have.
So you stack all this together.
Then when you combine that with…
any social or cultural phenomena that are occurring, or the fact that everyone, well, everyone, people really don’t seem to talk about counting anymore, but people in the know might mention it to you.
And then suddenly this story begins to exist.
I had a conception of what this looked like, but these stories wrecked them.
I think that’s the best one yet.
Let’s hope it’s a laugh.
Oh, we’re definitely going to have to wrap things up.
All right.
Well, okay.
So Lee, you’re our first time guest here.
So when people come on for the first time, besides harassing them with puns, we always like to ask this signature closing question, which is what is your favorite monster?
I spent the most time with the Yeti.
So not him.
Mothman is too simple.
Where me go one, me go all, right?
Oh, it’s trailing off now.
There are some really surreal monsters you find in early Chinese and Tibetan medical documents.
So you get stuff that’s just like a caterpillar with eight human legs and ears but no eyes or something that’s just like a ball covered in mouths.
I think those, at this point in my life, those are my favorites.
I realize those are not Japanese, but so many anime monsters seem to be akin to that.
I think there’s a through line of inspiration of these surreal, much more interesting than just big, hairy monsters.
Indeed.
If I did meet a Yeti, I would at least be able to ask them why they’re…
what they have to do with these UFOs and why they’re eating all of our cows’ rectums.
A fair question.
Please do.
Well, Lee, I can’t believe we’ve been doing the show this long and never really tackled this topic.
Oh, yeah, I know.
I appreciate you.
We asked you to really try to eat a giant dead elephant, and I think we’ve taken some really solid bites here.
So what are you going to do with your research?
You still thinking about what to do with it?
I am.
So initially it began as a broader topic looking at how paranormal phenomenon, particularly mass paranormal psychogenic events like these, induce religious experiences and spiritual experiences.
Initially, I was thinking about doing an academic paper, but I’ve kind of sworn off of those.
I’m done with them.
I’m not totally sure what is going to become of this.
I have a couple of little just short summaries of the more interesting cases I found.
Ones that focus on, again, like the weird monsters, the ones that focus on comparisons to horse ripping, similar phenomena in Europe and internationally.
But yeah, again, and if anyone is interested in a…
bunch of odd stories about dead animals, they can feel free to let me know.
I think this would make a great book.
I do too.
I really do.
But I would never, struggling through my own and watching Kieran go through hers, I wouldn’t wish that on anybody, but I think it can be good.
Well, I hope you do something with it because it seems like you’ve done a lot of work and I’m really pleased about that.
I love it when anybody goes to the trouble of just pulling together all this work.
You get your Mike Dash’s, your Robert Bartholomew type people doing this kind of stuff.
So that’s really great.
I think you’re a good company.
Fantastic.
Thank you guys so much again for having me.
I really appreciate it.
Really interesting stuff.
I have to keep in touch and bring you back on again.
Indeed.
Thank you so much.
Have a good night.
Thank you, Lee.
Hey, you too, guys.
Thanks again.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
Well, that was part two of our look at the phenomena of animal mutilations with religious studies scholar Lee Weiss.
Check out the show notes for links to Lee’s work as well as his contact information if you want to help him with his search for more information about animal mutilations or with contacting Linda, I mean, MA award-winning television producer Linda Moulton Howe.
Oh, and check out the show notes for one more thing.
I asked Lee for an example of the kinds of monster he was talking about when he did his favorite monster pic.
He sent me a link to the Hun Dun, a strange creature from China with six legs, no head or face, and four wings.
And I didn’t remember ever seeing such a thing before, but I have.
There’s a delightful animated one in the Marvel movie Shang-Chi that’s hanging out with Ben Kingsley’s Trevor Slattery character.
What is that?
Oh, who?
You can see Morris.
Morris?
Oh, Morris.
They can see you.
You’re real.
All this time I thought I was hallucinating him.
Where’s his face?
He’s a bit sensitive about that.
And I enjoyed the heck out of that film, but it was so full of amazing imagery that poor Morris the Hundun has fallen out of my recollections.
It reminds me a bit of the old story about the city fella who found himself driving a country road out in the sticks when he was passed by a four-legged chicken.
When he saw the chicken run into a farm, he pulled in after it and asked the farmer what’s going on.
The farmer told him it was an experimental chicken with four legs they were trying out to see if they could get more legs per bird.
Oh, how do they taste, said the city fella.
We don’t know, said the farmer.
We’ve never caught one.
Monster Talk theme music is by Pete Stealing Monkeys.
I wonder if amateur researchers waiting around to see what comes to eat dead cattle count as some kind of a stakeout.
This has been a Monster House presentation.

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