Cattle mutilations in Wyoming and the West…

The horror of mutilated cattle, cheeks severed from one side, tongues missing, genitals removed, bloodless carcasses and no visible signs of predation made headlines in Wyoming and the West in the mid-1970s.

Wyoming has received reports of cattle mutilation in Newcastle, Bridger Valley, Uinta County and Sublette County. Horse mutilations occurred in Meeteetse and Carbon counties. Two years later, there was a report of a heifer near Casper found dead in similar circumstances.

In the years immediately after the Vietnam War and Watergate, suspects included the U.S. military, which some believed conducted experiments or harvested tissue, participated in Satanic cults or visited UFOs.

The Nebraska senator’s efforts to involve the FBI in the case were met with hesitation and reluctance from the agency, which only fueled speculation. The mystery has dragged on for decades, continuing to terrify farmers and former law enforcement officers as Halloween approaches, reminding them of the true horror they endured.

“This has been going on for three years in our area,” former Uinta County Sheriff Leonard Hysell told Cowboy State Daily in an interview. “In the first year there were an incredible number of them, a lot of them.”

Although the headlines died down in the 1980s, reports of periodic cattle mutilations still appear. In 2023, six cows were mutilated in a similar way in Texas. The mutilations that have occurred in Eastern Oregon communities in recent years are featured in the latest season of Netflix’s “Unsolved Mysteries.”

Current Wyoming Livestock Association Executive Vice President Jim Magagna and Wyoming State Veterinarian Dr. Hollie Hasel have stated that they are not aware of any reports of mutilations in the state since they took up their positions.

The mutilations begin

But in the 1970s the losses were real and farmers and law enforcement could find no culprit or motive for the grotesque mutilations in the Cowboy State and the rest of the country.

On October 26, 1975, the Casper Star-Tribune reported that the number of suspected cattle mutilations had exceeded 45, with 10 in Sublette County and 16 in Uinta County. On September 30, a newspaper reported a calf north of Gillette with its genitals severed and its stomach cut with a sharp instrument.

The Campbell County Sheriff’s Office characterized the death as a “confirmed mutilation” after a veterinarian was unable to determine the cause of death and there were no signs or signs of predators or humans.

For Hysell, then a Uinta County sheriff’s deputy, the incidents were the strangest cases he had handled in his 47-year law enforcement career, including 20 years in Uinta County.

“We only took those that were fresh victims and anything that was over 24 hours old, we didn’t try to speculate on that,” he said. “Fresh killings that we really tried to investigate. We collected a really large number of them. Only one farmer had 16, six in one night in one pasture. “Now predators don’t do that.”

Helicopter evidence

While many news reports talk about the lack of evidence and leads surrounding the killings, Hysell said he found some evidence in some places that made him suspicious of the cause – and it involved helicopters.

Around the time the mutilated cattle were discovered, there were credible reports of military helicopters in the area, and in one case three in different locations. Hysell said the plane had no numbers on its sides, did not use lights and was only seen at dusk.

“We found a lot of sediment from the rotors around the carcasses, we found traces of landing skis,” he said. “This led me to believe it was something more complicated than that. And predators would have nothing to do with these carcasses. The birds wouldn’t peck at them. We have never had such incidents before and never since. If they were predators, why didn’t it continue? It just didn’t happen.

On September 3, 1975, the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph reported that El Paso County Sheriff’s Deputy Gary Gibbs had pointed out a Satanic cult.

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

Hysell said he disagreed with the cult theory because of the money needed to operate the helicopters that were flying in and around his county at the time. But he knows the federal government and state agencies have been extremely reluctant to help sheriff’s departments across the West. And that’s in Wyoming too.

“State crime labs would have nothing to do with either Wyoming or Utah,” he said. “I’ve heard from other sheriff’s offices that they’ve dealt with this situation in all of their states.”

FBI file

The FBI’s cattle mutilation files reveal letters sent by Nebraska Sen. Carl Curtis to FBI Director Clarence M. Kelly in 1974, asking for the federal agency’s help in solving the crime.

“This will be a reference to my previous letter of August 21 to you regarding a series of incidents stretching from Oklahoma to Nebraska in which cattle have been dismembered as part of some strange witchcraft cult,” Curtis wrote. “I wonder if your good offices have initiated an investigation into this situation in Nebraska or any other state where similar acts of livestock mutilation have occurred.”

The FBI director responded on September 10, 1974, that he had ordered an agent to review the matter and found that “no federal law under FBI jurisdiction had been violated.”

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

Retired FBI agent Kenneth Rommel investigated a cattle mutilation on a native reservation in New Mexico and concluded that predators were to blame.

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

Rommel actually sent flakes of cloth that appeared on the summit of Taos, New Mexico. pickup truck in July 1978 after a UFO allegedly flew over it. The FBI lab said it was white enamel, typical of household exterior paints, and the particles “appear to be from a wood substrate.”

Predator Application ‘Invalid’

Hysell said he did not accept the FBI’s predatory conclusions.

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

Hysell said he suspects the government was involved in the mutilation, possibly the result of a chemical or biological accident, and research is needed to see how widespread the material was.

“There were mutilations at every point where air, water or food could have entered or escaped the bodies,” he said.

An article in the October 23, 1977 issue of the Casper Star-Tribune quoted the national spokesman for the Cattlemen’s Association as estimating that 3,000 mutilations were reported in 22 states, beginning in late 1974 and continuing through a peak in the summers of 1975 and 1976.

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

A congressional report by the Committee on Veterans Affairs and Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV on December 8, 1994, stated that the range was a testing site for various chemical and biological agents.

A 1968 report stated that 6,400 sheep near the facility died as a result of “the deliberate release of deadly nerve gas from an aircraft.”

“The Department of Defense initially denied any responsibility for the accident… However, autopsy of the poisoned sheep identified the nerve agent VX, making it clear that the death was not caused by pesticides,” the report said. “Ultimately, the Department of Defense refunded the farmers for their animals.”

“Simulation Testing”

The report said that after his death in 1968, the Department of Defense developed “simulation” tests. But during “45 years” of outdoor testing, “the Army stopped using various simulation fluids when it realized they were not as safe as believed,” the report said.

Although the mass mutilations of the mid-1970s have stopped, reports of similar mutilations continue to appear. One of the most recent reports involved six cattle mutilations in Texas.

A May 23, 2023 press release from the Animal Legal Defense Fund reported that in April 2023, a 6-year-old longhorn cow was discovered in Madison County whose tongue had been removed “in a straight, clean cut with apparent precision along the jawline.” The carrion animals did not touch the body.

Five additional cows were discovered in neighboring Brazos and Robertson counties with their anuses and genitals as well as their tongues removed.

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

When Hysell looks back on the mid-1970s and working with sheriff’s departments across the West, he recalls many people being “ridiculed” as they tried to find answers.

“I feel like the news is controlling us,” he said. “I will tell you this in at least one case, I won’t tell you what condition it was in, the person who worked in the crime lab was told to stay away from it, that they would not accept any more samples and they were to keep quiet about it.

Dale Killingbeck you can arrive at [email protected].