Content Warning: This episode contains detailed discussion of animal injuries and death. Both parts carry an explicit tag.

Blake and Karen welcome Lee Weiss, a religious studies scholar whose deep dive into the FBI’s declassified cattle mutilation files grew into a sweeping study of one of America’s strangest panics. Blake first met Lee at the Of Gods and Monsters conference in 2019, and the two reconnected at its 2026 sequel – both contributed to the academic volume Religion, Culture, and the Monstrous. (affiliate link)

In part one of this two-part investigation, Lee lays out the anatomy of the “classic mute” – the missing eyes, ears, and soft tissue, the reportedly bloodless wounds, the absent tracks – and traces the phenomenon back to its 1967 case zero: Snippy the horse, found dead in Colorado’s San Luis Valley. From Victorian sheep panics and escaped menagerie cats to the economic collapse of the 1970s American rancher, the picture that emerges is far stranger than dead livestock. And that’s before the unmarked helicopters show up.

Part two lands next week.

Key Topics & Themes The “Classical Mutilation” Profile : Missing soft tissues often include genitals, eyes (especially the left), ears, tail, lower jaw flesh, tongue, and rectum. * Scene Anomalies: There is often an absent or anomalous amount of blood at the scene, including claims of “drained” carcasses or blood that is dried “like sand.” * Physical Evidence Claims: Alleged laser-like or cauterized wound edges are a recurring claim not supported by forensic examination. * Mysterious Circumstances: Scenes reportedly feature no tracks — of predators, humans, or even the animal itself — and a conspicuous scavenger and predator avoidance of carcasses. * Concomitant Phenomena : Mutilation flaps are frequently accompanied by UFO sightings, monster sightings (like dog-men), unmarked helicopters, and community-wide psychological contagion. * The 1967 “Case Zero” : The Snippy / Lady case in the San Luis Valley, CO, was the first case explicitly linked to UFO speculation in mass media, despite the local sheriff initially attributing the death to a lightning strike. There is also frequent naming confusion, as the horse’s real name was Lady, while Snippy was her sire. * Historical Anchoring : Claims often reference Victorian England and France livestock panics (and wealthy menagerie-escape theories) or King James’s Demonology (1606). The hosts note that this backward extension of history lends false credibility to contemporary panics. * The 1970s Mutilation Wave : The panic coincided with struggling small ranchers, Nixon’s grain deal with the USSR, and growing anti-government sentiment in rural America during the Vietnam era. A mass rancher cattle kill as a protest act occurred around 1973–74. * Conspiracy Theories : Explanations ranged from government mad cow disease surveillance to Operation Plowshare nuclear detonations, Satanic cults, military psyops mirroring Vietnam tactics, and alien harvesting. * Skeptical Counter-Explanations :* Post-mortem taphonomic processes (scavengers, insects, bloat) and reporting bias among ranchers primed by media coverage account for the phenomena naturally. The federally funded Rommel Report (1979–80) concluded the deaths were predominantly natural.

Episode LinksCattle Mutilation– Wikipedia’s overview of the phenomenon, its history, and investigations
The Mutilation of “Snippy” the Horse– the 1967 Alamosa, Colorado case that started it all (the horse was actually named Lady – Snippy was her sire)
The Condon Committee– whose investigation of the Snippy case found no evidence of abnormal causes
Gabe Valdez– the New Mexico State Police officer who became the state’s best-known mutilation investigator
British Big Cats– the “alien big cat” phenomenon Blake compares to earlier livestock panics
Dr. Darren Naish– previous MonsterTalk guest referenced in the alien big cat discussion
Project Plowshare– the government program detonating nuclear devices for civilian purposes near several mutilation hotspots
The Mi-Go– the Lovecraftian fungi from Yuggoth – and also a complex term from Tibet, a subject our guest has studied deeply

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

PromotionsCheck out Karen’s bookBeyond Words.

CreditsMonsterTalk is hosted by Blake Smith and Dr. Karen Stollznow.

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In September 1967, on the King Ranch in the San Luis Valley of Colorado, an Appaloosa mare called Snippy was found dead and stripped of flesh from the neck up.
Some said this was the work of flying saucers.
Who or whatever did it, no one knows.
Since that time, and perhaps even earlier in this century, thousands of cattle, horses, and other animals have been cut up in strange ways throughout the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, Panama, the Canary Islands, and possibly other South American and European countries.
Parts missing are usually an ear, an eye, the tongue, the lower jaw is stripped of all flesh, the sexual organs are cut out, the rectum is cored out, and in some cases, the blood is gone.
Adding to the mystery is lack of tracks or other evidence.
Mutilated cattle have been found on wet sand or rain-soaked ground with no tracks around them, not even their own.
Some people call it cattle mutilation.
Whatever it’s called, it’s a strange harvest.
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.
So this week we’re kicking off a two-part look at the very mysterious and icky world of animal mutilations.
That horrific and disturbing introductory clip was from a documentary hosted and put together by Emmy Award winning journalist Linda Moulton Howe.
We’ll hear much more about that film and its various versions next week in part two.
But the clip does a couple of things.
Firstly, it quickly and tidily summarizes what sorts of oddities people refer to when they talk about the weird shitology category animal mutilations.
second it justifies the warning up at the top and the explicit tag that we’re slapping on both parts because some people will find the talk of the damage done to these animals disturbing also since I’ve already put in the explicit warning I get to say weird shitology without beeping it out that saves time
Skeptical investigators will tell you what’s really going on in most of these cases is natural post-mortem taphonomic processes performed by predators, carrion feeders, insects, and other biologically mundane factors.
But while that may be statistically true, the really weird part, the part that gets the weird shitology seal of approval, is all the adjacent circumstances surrounding these cases.
It’s animals found in oddly inaccessible places, a lack of tracks, the appearance of strange lights, mysterious unmarked vehicles, or a reported lack of blood.
And we will discuss a lot of that stuff over the next two episodes.
But in the end…
All we can honestly say is that animal mutilations of the type we’re discussing have so many unusual features that we couldn’t cover it all in a single episode.
Or in a two-parter.
Honestly, even an encyclopedic book would be challenged to contain the amount of oddness, and a scholar trying to tackle such a thing would likely feel utterly lost.
But my friend and fellow researcher Lee Weiss is collecting and compiling.
He has been for a while, and even though he’s still in the data gathering phase of his research, I suspected he would do a great job of introducing this topic to you fellow monster talkers.
So that’s what we’re going to do for these next two episodes.
One more thing.
This is a disturbing topic, but I’ve had a few decades to get over it.
If by some chance this is your first experience with such mutilations, I think you’re in good hands with Lee.
But you might find some of my comments sound flippant.
I hope a little levity is appropriate to lighten what would otherwise be a rather dark and disturbing walk through history.
Not just the animal deaths, but the economic and political story around them.
It can be a lot to take in.
I come from a family of farmers and ranchers and blue-collar people who know the toughness of trying to make it as an independent business person in these risky but vital professions.
So I’m not making fun of them and I’m not making fun of the pain and suffering of the animals.
But take, just for example, the case of cattle mutilation in the extreme elevations of the Rocky Mountains around Colorado.
I could speak of those cases with empathy and compassion.
but I cannot walk away from all that wordplay, people.
The stakes are just too high.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to the show, Lee Weiss.
I met Lee for the first time at Gods and Monsters 1, although we recently met up again at Gods and Monsters 2, Eclectic Rougarou.
Rougarou.
Rougarou.
Rougarou.
But Lee was giving a talk about the me go or the me go, which I thought our Lovecraft fans out there will mean they know that you’re a fun guy.
So that’s my that’s my Call of Cthulhu joke.
All right.
So, yeah.
So we have to ask the question.
This is a big topic.
And as I told Lee last night, it’s like we have to ask the question, how do we eat?
An enormous dead elephant with its genitals and eyeballs already gone being harassed by unmarked helicopters all the while.
So, again, I think the answer is still one bite at a time.
But before we get out our forks and napkins, welcome, Lee.
Is there anything else you want to add about yourself?
Or did I nail most of it?
I think you got it.
I think the elephant comment particularly encapsulates what I’m about.
Excellent.
Oh, it’s a scary stop.
This is such a huge topic.
I guess not exactly monstrous, but definitely monster adjacent, which is territory that we’ve very happily embraced to keep the show going.
But I mean, this is a mystery that’s been with us effectively our whole lives.
And I guess what we should probably start with is figuring out what we’re talking about.
What are animal mutilations or cattle mutilations or livestock mutilations?
Because if you listen to the people reporting them, they’re not just dead animals.
There’s something going on.
What are we talking about today?
So I think the best way to start talking about it is to look at what is called in the community the classical mutilation.
And that has, depending on who you talk to, a variety of different signs.
Generally, and the most generally, but we’ll see, there’s an acceptance of pretty much every rule, like that this…
phenomena presents.
You’ll be missing genitals.
There will be missing eyes, particularly left eyes.
Ears will be gone.
Sometimes tails will be gone.
There will be either very clean cuts like wounds to the animal or odd jagged edges.
All of these things, and then you get even more novel phenomena, like people will claim that there’s no blood anywhere, whereas they would usually see blood with these, that the wounds don’t bleed, which ultimately is a fairly normal thing in a dead animal, but that there is a conspicuous lack of blood.
This accelerates the point of animals drained of blood, animals completely bloodless, or even the blood being dried off, like it’s present, but it’s almost like sand.
A really common claim later on becomes that these wounds are sealed with lasers, that they’re cauterized.
Then you get these kinds of…
dealing with the locale and the ways that they’re found, that there are no tracks around anywhere.
So not only that dogs and coyotes will seem to avoid them, or birds, but that the animal itself, generally a cow or a bull, sometimes a horse, rarely a lamb, very rarely a pig or something else, but there will be no tracks of that leading to the site where it was killed, which all of the authorities find very unusual.
So those are the normal traits of the individual act of the animal mutilation.
The larger and more interesting component of it is that once one person finds a dead mutilated animal,
many other people in the community will begin to.
And there are a number of, I think, very well-recorded cases where this happened almost simultaneously, where the two people did not communicate with each other or read any third party or talk to a police officer.
They both simply found these dead cows and…
both had an extreme reaction to it.
Now, in general, this occurs within a social context where people already knew about this more broadly, but it’s still unusual that they would both have this experience.
There’s also these concomitant phenomena of unusual aerial sightings.
It’s deeply tied in with UFOs, as we’ll talk extensively about.
But then you mentioned monsters.
It’s also tied in very closely with monster sightings.
Sheriff Valdez, Gabe Valdez, who’s one of the major figures in this, and Wolverton.
Also, I think Sheriff Wolverton or Captain Wolverton.
both of them in their books on this subject and they’re these major figures and these major like first-hand investigators these 70s incidences all of them devote a lot of time and attention to monster sightings that occur concomitantly within i don’t know to borrow like ufology terminology flaps of cattle mutilations or these these localized events these mass events
And yeah, people will start seeing UFOs and they’ll start seeing monsters.
And just like with the cattle mutilations, there’s one really odd case where two separate young girls in this, I believe it was Colwell, it’ll come up later.
Both of them see like dog men stalking through the night on the same night, but they didn’t like, I mean, it was a small town.
I’m sure they were, but they didn’t know each other.
So I’d say those are kind of the,
the features of what we’re talking about.
As we’ll talk about later, there’s a lot of different global phenomena of people finding dead animals and the community becoming almost irrationally afraid and then having…
psychogenic, religious, spiritual, whatever you…
These paranormal events surrounding it.
The cattle mutilation phenomenon in America, in North America, I think is unique in that it has this kind of…
It imagines that it has this very rigorous structure.
Well, these are the classic cattle mutilations, but… Well, I’d like to…
pop in and ask a couple of questions you’ve covered a lot of ground already uh but i’m just wondering uh why cattle i mean you’ve talked about other animals to pigs and horses uh but it seems to be
seems like the canonical thing is that the cattle mutilations and also where this is occurring.
So you’re saying this is worldwide.
I’m here, I’m in Colorado at the moment and I hear of a lot of cases here, but I don’t think I ever heard of any in Australia where I grew up, but presumably a lot of farming there, agriculture.
I suspect that there are probably some cases there too.
But yeah, if you could tell us a little bit about why cattle and where these are occurring mostly.
I’m so glad that you brought up Australia already because that is a really interesting side point of the whole phenomena.
But to get to the question, I’m not entirely sure.
I do have my suspicions.
I think it has to do with the way that cattle are raised, are ranched.
They’re…
unless they’re on a feed line, they’re often outside, particularly in the 60s through 70s and 80s in North America.
And also in Australia in the 30s and 40s, I’m not sure about now.
It is a lack of knowledge of mine.
these animals are outside all the time and sometimes the ranchers won’t see them for days on end and that will be normal.
So when the rancher discovers the cattle, it’s, you know, in an advanced state of mutilation if it’s died perhaps two days ago and has been preyed upon.
I suspect that’s the real reason.
Like if we were just, you know, a scientific explanation, I would say that’s what’s happening.
And vis-a-vis Australia, there’s this…
During the late 70s, early 80s, when there is this huge panic in North America.
one of the major international sources of confirmation that this is happening everywhere is Australia.
And there’s a lot of weird urban legends that come out of these zines and these cult publications surrounding it, by guys like Tom Adams, who we’ll talk about later.
There’s actually a fake movie, a fake silent movie.
find the name when we get into Australia later on but that I’ve seen in like lists of lost films but it’s I mean it’s not a real movie it’s allegedly about flying saucers abducting cattle in Australia and it’s linked to this like silent film director in Australia but it’s not real but there are a number of cattle mutilation
paddocks in Australia, but that seemed to be tied to ranching and cattle rustling and economic concerns as opposed to anything UFO related or government related.
Well, I don’t know where to begin because there’s so many elements to this, but I’m just wondering, where did this link to UFOs and to the government?
How did these connections?
begin to be these associations how were they made to to animals just dying and decomposing well please i was gonna say should we start with at some point like okay listeners will know i had sort of a pet peeve or
a bugbear or something around the idea that when a monster flap happens, somebody comes along and extends the history and anchors it in the past for sort of a credibility anchor.
So let’s just start with when the pop culture conception of this phenomenon happened.
Like, can we, can we talk about like what, I guess there is sort of a case zero, even though if, if the skeptics are right about what’s really going on, there’s no case zero because this has always been happening, but.
But what’s case zero for animal mutilations?
And let’s bring it from there, if that’s cool.
If that works for you, Karen.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
So 100%, it’s snippy.
Or I believe her real name was Lady.
Yeah, why the pseudonym?
Was she a dancer or something?
It’s a great question.
I thought you said Skippy.
We’re talking about Australia too, so.
It’s interesting that Snippy is the archetypal case because Snippy has almost nothing in common with the later cases.
Now, Snippy is the first kind of time…
It’s the first time where one of these events was viewed through a, let’s say, paranormal lens.
Because I found a number of much earlier accounts of like what I would still call like mass panics.
dealing with like um even in like in america and in france that goes back a long ways this one was quite early on tied in with ufo activity but even before then the family didn’t have any idea it was happening um snippy’s weird for a lot of reasons now so my understanding is snippy was her father the horse’s father and and again this is coming from it’s these accounts are so inaccurate
And a lot of them then are filtered through like UFO comic books, but this is for sure the first real like, it cements it in the cultural imagination.
But yeah, so Snippy is this horse, I believe her name was Lady, her father’s name was Snippy.
And the family finds her and it’s quite, it is quite striking and grotesque.
And it’s one of the ones that I’ve looked at where I actually have no idea what caused the injuries.
Like a lot of them, I’m very confident.
Like most of them, I’d say, you can explain this.
I mean, it’s weird.
And a lot of them, they’re very strange.
And I can see why people are freaked out by them.
But you can explain them.
This one is a little inexplicable.
The sheriff says she got hit by a bolt of lightning.
Karen, have you seen the snippy picture?
Yes, I have.
Okay, good.
So we’re all on the same page.
It is quite a striking image.
And I think that… A lightning striking image.
Oh, yeah.
Sorry, I love current events.
If we’re calling snippy case zero, and I agree with you, because after snippy, we start to see, and I’m sure we’ll get into the 1970s, what happens there.
But I’m wondering, before snippy…
This reminds me a little bit of some, they’re not moral panics, but they’re kind of a panic that happens sometimes where people decide that there’s a big cat out there.
There’s something, there’s some kind of predator out there and we’re going to have to hunt it, especially in the UK, where they’re going to hire…
trackers to track down because some sheep have died and there’s got to be an explanation and it’s got to be you know something unusual and do those cases kind of fit into this or have you looked at that or do or am i on it i’m on a side rail somewhere i think they’re very closely connected okay um and again so that’s i think when people post snippy and like post like the
All of the books that have like their introductions always will pre-snippy what was before the trying to, like you said, sort of create some broader history to it.
Historical anchoring, I think is how I call it.
And they always go to these…
Yeah, this Victorian, and there’s earlier accounts they find.
There’s one, I think, that in King James Demonology, he writes, this is like 1606.
Yeah, he goes back a piece, right?
He writes about sheep being massacred, but it’s so vague, you can’t really.
The ones that are the most similar to what…
We’re talking, and what we see even in the 30s and 40s are, and I think these people are finding it in, it’s in, I think, low or strange talents.
I’ll pick it up in a second.
The whole idea is you have these Victorian communities in England and France that are being terrified by, yeah, like these wolves, these weird beasts.
The weird thing about those is some of them later on get explained.
And I’m skeptical of even these explanations.
They get explained by like local noblemen who own these private zoos.
They were just these Victorian private zoos, and they would, like, lose ocelots.
It’s the wealthy menagerie.
Today we’re dealing with a classic menage.
Menage?
A menagerie.
Oh, it’s basically just a big-ass alien zoo full of aliens run by another alien.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Yes.
That comes up in the alien big cat community a lot.
And yeah, because there’s a number of cases where that’s, like, you have…
this strange creature stalking around in the woods and all of these sheep are mutilated in the communities and an uproar and then like you don’t hear about them two weeks later they like shoot a strange like some ant like animal from some guys but again i i don’t know i don’t know how how closely like how true that actually i mean the menagerie element is true and i’m sure that a bunch of animals escape from these menageries but
The connection does seem a little convenient to me.
Darren Nash has been on a few times.
We’ve discussed alien big cats, and it’s like there’s a plausible possibility that some surviving bodies of non-local large cats could exist in the UK.
It’s biologically plausible, and there seems to be some evidence for it.
But I think it’s probably overstated.
I would say…
In my estimation, the wealthy menagerie is kind of comparable to what in America we would call the derailed circus train.
Well, it’s a weird animal.
That’s not unusual, but it’s unusual that it would be here.
So therefore…
We have to have an explanation, and therefore the plausible explanation is a train derailed and let loose a collection of animals.
I cannot let this go.
I’m going to track down every record I can find of American circus train wrecks, because I just suspect there’s not very many, but it comes up as an explanation a lot.
Well, then we have the version in Australia of American soldiers bringing over these creatures.
indigenous also plausible that that really seems to have happened some but then to what extent do they survive and breed over a panther as a mascot or something like that yeah anyway
All right.
So I want to go to the 1970s where everything happens.
I was just a little guy in the 1970s.
I wasn’t old enough to to watch R-rated movies or read this sort of literature.
But meanwhile.
Across America, ranchers were getting quite upset because of what was going on with these animal mutilations and the government’s response.
So I guess we need to talk about that a little bit.
I don’t know how much we want to cover the economic, sociopolitical components of this.
Because you can get really into it.
And I don’t particularly want to.
It’s really…
quite tedious.
30 minutes later.
And if you look at this graph, you can see…
When it comes to choosing accounting software, there’s no accounting for taste.
That is effectively the situation.
But it is fascinating, and it really plays a major role in this.
Could we say that the American rancher was undergoing an extensive period of economic difficulty?
It was an extensive period of economic difficulty, absolutely.
But in addition to that, there’s also…
There’s this wheat deal that we make with the USSR, which is an attempt to kind of thaw relations.
It results in this halting of, as I understand it, the raising of the price.
Ultimately, this makes it incredibly difficult to raise cattle, particularly for small independent ranches, which were precipitously declining from the 50s to the 80s.
So there is this real economic
struggle that’s occurring um i think one thing that i’ve actually never seen it mentioned in any cattle mutilation literature i might be wrong about that but i’m pretty sure i’m right
In the same time, I believe it’s 73 or 74, there’s a mass protest of ranchers about the specific ramifications of this law because they can’t afford to feed their cattle.
So their cattle are too expensive effectively to sell.
So they bring out all of their cattle to this field, these hundreds of ranchers, and just kind of kill, like murder their cattle as an act of protest.
I don’t know if it’s murder, if it’s an animal.
It depends what you’re…
You’re a vegetarian or not.
Well, the Smiths say meat is murder, right?
Be loath to disagree with Morrissey.
So this was some sort of stakeout.
Oh, dear.
Linda McCartney said that first, but anyway.
Red Bull gives you wings.
Oh, she did?
Oh, I thought she was talking about stakeouts.
Okay, okay.
Sorry.
But so this is occurring at the same time that these cattle mutilation kind of outbreaks are happening and this social panic is happening.
There’s also a great deal of correlation between the kind of move that the Midwestern rancher makes away from kind of the mainstream politics of the 50s and 60s into a more libertarian skepticism of the federal government.
Again, largely because of Nixon’s economic policies.
This, I think, has a lot to do with the conspiratorial overtones and even the UFO overtones that the whole phenomena ultimately adopts.
So I think that’s an important kind of component.
I think we won’t get into…
the economic parameters of the wreck and the dual economic, but all of these things undergird what becomes this, I mean, it staged the scene for this kind of collective social pattern.
Yeah.
And so to sort of navigate this, you’ve got a culture and an important…
economic component of at least the united states because these ranchers are they’re big business right but they’re struggling and to some extent they’re blaming the government for their economic problems but now this mutilation flap happens so
How does it go?
Maybe you can give me this roadmap.
How does it go from angry ranchers in small communities to having like a big government response with hearings and papers being delivered?
How do we bridge that piece of the timeline?
How do we get to the government actually saying something’s going on, but it’s natural?
How does that happen?
Slowly at first, but then incredibly quickly.
So the real…
I think the beginning of the crisis…
you get local sheriffs and local authorities involved and they can’t explain what’s happening either.
Because, I mean, the ranchers are obviously more knowledgeable than they are about what they’re seeing in the cattle because they don’t spend all day dealing with cattle.
And these ranchers have seen hundreds of dead cattle, which is ultimately what gives their testimony so much credibility.
I mean, they do know more about dead cows than any of us do.
But so the ranchers agree with them.
And the sheriffs agree with the ranchers and they bring that back up.
Then this spreads and sometimes local media will pick it up.
And these are generally small towns.
This is all occurring within this kind of culture of fear and skepticism.
There’s also the Vietnam War.
Yeah, the 70s were a big…
divisive time a lot of american myths are collapsing right so one of the early theories that shows up quite like in in the in the like in stigmata which is the major uh mute zine of the time and like really the the early receptacle for it and it shows up over and over and over again the theory is that well this must be
traumatized veterans coming back from vietnam and this theory continues to show up we’ll i’ll talk more like it is a military psyop is this this replication of actual things that american psychological operations forces did to villages and i don’t want to criticize their newsletter but they missed a great opportunity to call it steak mata i’m just saying that
But we’re going to have to break this episode into two parts.
And I want to make sure that people who listen to this first part tune in for part two, because as this community is coming up and saying, look, we’re suffering economic.
difficulty because of these mutilations it’s more than that like they’re not just saying these cattle are dying they’re saying some very weird stuff is going on there’s a stack of of mysterious unusual quasi-paranormal phenomena going on
And I think it would not be wrong to say government conspiracy, animal testing, satanic cults comes up a lot, a shocking amount of alien conspiracy.
And then, of course, some people just saying, no, no, these are natural deaths, which is not nearly as popular an answer.
So.
Can you set us up for part two?
If we’re going to wind down part one here, tell us about the conspiracy theories that start to stack up.
So that’s the thing.
And part of what drove me to this topic initially was it, as with a lot of these mass paranormal experiences, there’s this very religious component to it.
There’s this very intense, like…
these experiences seem to presage further strange experiences and i think that’s part of what like what propels the the panic in the beginning like at all what makes it so viable that these ranchers who see these dead animals all the time suddenly begin to think oh well maybe it’s the government maybe it’s a cult maybe it’s aliens because people begin to have incredibly strange experiences and continue to have strange experiences
specifically surrounding this ostensibly conventional phenomena.
So some of the theories that, I mean, these people really want to build up theories.
And while now I think the alien abduction theory is probably the most popular, up until the 90s, government involvement or a conspiracy involving…
the meat industry, the idea that there is some occult infection of mad cow disease in the meat supply that the government is surreptitiously testing to avoid a mass panic.
Valdez’s theory, Sheriff Valdez and then his son, who has taken up his legacy investigating these things, believe that these were tied to government investigations into
exposure of radiation.
So at the same time and location that these mutilations are happening, the United States government is engaged in something called Operation Plowshare, where they’re detonating atomic nuclear weapons for civilian purposes, mining and effectively oil fracking.
Now, a lot of these mutilations occur incredibly close to Operation Plowshare sites, and there’s only like four of them.
to perform a multitude of peaceful tasks for the betterment of mankind.
Man is exploring a source of enormous, potentially useful energy, the nuclear explosion.
He sees the potentials and he sees the problems.
To investigate both and to develop the technology that will turn potentials into realities, the United States is conducting, for the benefit of all nations, a program it calls Plowshare.
It’s also in a giant expanse of the country, which is perfect for ranching.
Then you get, particularly we’ll talk about Linda Bolton Howe soon, I’m sure, you start to get the alien explanation, which again has been tied into it since Snippy.
And…
That then gets tied back.
It always gets tied back to this government conspiracy.
There’s a skepticism that the federal government is withholding information, which is why they get involved and get involved so quickly.
I think it starts initially slowly, then it just spirals out of control.
And that’s a good breaking point, I think.
Sorry, I think because what was going to happen is I think.
In 1980, Linda Moulton Howell’s movie, Strange Harvest, is going to take every one of these theories and wrap it up in a beautiful package that she delivers to America, sort of.
We’ll talk about the spread of it.
But I think we need to break here and then come back next week in part two to explain how this stuff explodes nationally and where we end up today.
Thank you so much for joining us, Lee.
We’ll see you next week.
Thank you very much, guys.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard part one of our look into cattle mutilations with independent researcher Lee Weiss.
Be sure to check out the show notes for more info on the topics discussed and for links to books and videos that we brought up.
And you got to come back for part two and the show notes for part two because we will get into way more of Emmy Award winning Linda Moulton Howell’s documentary Strange Harvest.
I think you’ll enjoy my data visualizations about that in the show notes next week.
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The United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, Panama, the Canary Islands, and possibly other South American and European countries have been cut up in strange ways.
Some said this was the work of flying saucers.
This has been a Monster House presentation.

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