A Sci-Fi Whodunnit With Many Suspects Source: Florida Today CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - A former FBI agent claims he solved the riddle nearly two decades ago; a local rancher says the ex G-man "is out of his head."
The usual suspects - UFOs, satanic cults and unmarked black helicopters - have never been apprehended. An empty-handed Colorado sheriff who began chasing the phantoms in the 1970s sardonically says "I'll be on the first jet down" at
news of an arrest. The latest theory - exposure to microwave radiation - sounds like a sci-fi whodunnit.
This much is certain: Whoever, or whatever, is killing Central Florida cattle is now being taken seriously by the state, so seriously the state formed a task force on March
28 to investigate. The macabre wounds on the carcasses are inviting comparisons to the so-called cattle mutilations that began plaguing western ranchers in the '60s and '70s and continue today.
"Random poaching happens all the time," says Marty Smith, president of the Florida Cattlemen's Association in
Kissimmee. "But the removing of certain body parts, internal and sexual organs - this is different. This is not what we typically expect."
According to Jack Hill, investigator with the Department of Agriculture and Law Enforcement, as many as 20 dead cattle in Brevard, Seminole, Lake and St. Lucie counties can be
linked by at least some of the following wounds, going back to the late summer of 1996: Missing tongues, eyes, ears, anuses, udders, and genitalia. Furthermore, a number of the wounds - some involving the extraction of organs through circular holes - reportedly show little or no evidence of bleeding.
"We're not really sure what's going on," says Hill, who heads the state's task force. "We don't even know what the
cattle are dying from. Only one necropsy has come back so far, and that's probably inadequate for what we need."
The FCA is offering a $1,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of the killers, and the April issue of The Florida Cattleman magazine warns ranchers not to handle mutilated cattle because "unknown persons have been poisoning (them)." Hill, however, says poisoning is only a theory. But he discloses few details for fear of jeopardizing the investigation.
Palm Bay Police Lt. Buck DeCoteau isn't in on the
information loop, but he has investigated animal deaths related to satanic or alternative religious activity. Perhaps, he surmises, the killings coincide with milestones on the Satanic Ritual calendar requiring blood sacrifice.
"They're constantly killing chickens, goats and pigs," DeCoteau says. "But cattle in the middle of a pasture -
that's new to me. Cattle are hard to handle. They're big and bulky and they can't be easily transported."
At last count, in February, five Brevard cattle were being tentatively linked to the mutilations, but local sheriff's investigators will not comment on the record. Phone calls to the Platt ranches in South Brevard, where the deaths
were first discovered beginning in December, were not returned. Doug Platt, head of the Brevard Cattleman's Association, did not call back.
Sweep it under the rug
"In the South, especially, I've found that they don't want this stuff to come out," says veteran researcher Linda
Mouton Howe by phone from Philadelphia. "Everybody's content to sweep it under the rug as a predator or a satanic cult and leave it at that. Nobody wants to deal with the facts."
Howe was an environmental reporter for a Denver television station in the 1970s when 200 cattle mutilations turned up over an 18-month period in two Colorado counties; the
result was an Emmy-winning documentary in 1980 called "Strange Harvest."
She went on to author two books on mutilations, which she says have been recorded in every state in the union -
perhaps as many as 10,000 - and are now "a worldwide phenomenon."
Howe says eyewitnesses sometimes report unidentified lights in the night skies near mutilation areas. There are typically few signs of struggle, such as divots kicked up by flailing hooves. Microscopic analysis of bovine tissue
and grasses found near the animals, she adds, sometimes show cellular alterations consistent with exposure to microwave radiation.
"We are talking about advanced technology," Howe says.
But at the same time Howe produced her documentary, Ken Rommel of Santa Fe, N.M., completed his own study shortly
after retiring from the FBI. Funded on a grant from the district attorney's office, it was released in 1980, entitled Operation Animal Mutilation: Report of the District Attorney, First Judicial District, State of New Mexico. Its conclusion: natural factors explain the mutilations.
Dismissing contemporary reports as "garbage" and "a media story," Rommel says cows die all the time, from aging,
disease, lightning, or ingesting poisonous plants. Their bodies are frequently predated upon by birds who "eat away at the soft tissue," or ravenous blowflies, which can make even tongues disappear.
The post-mortem expansion of internal gases, Rommel adds, can literally blow holes through soft bovine bellies, which
account for the mysterious-looking cerrated edges often reported in mutilations. Organs that flow out as a consequence are quickly devoured by birds. Lack of blood, he adds, can be attributed to pooling and drying long before discovery of the carcass. Birds and blowflies leave no tracks.
"But this story will never die," he says. "People who lead dull and boring lives like to fantasize about things they don't understand."
Melbourne rancher Billy Kempfer didn't like that
explanation when he heard Rommel's spin recently. Although he never inspected a mutilation first hand, Kempfer talked to a rancher who discovered one of his cows while the carcass was still warm.
"There's something weird going on here," Kempfer says. "Whoever is doing this is making very, very precise cuts
with a scalpel or some other very sharp instrument. Buzzards do not remove a tongue at its base. Buzzards do not remove ears. That guy (Rommel) is full of (it)."
Problems throughout Southwest
Lou Girodo, Las Animas County sheriff in Trinidad, Col., began investigating mutilations in 1975 when he was with
the Colorado district attorney's office. Some 50 cattle died under mysterious circumstances in that county alone. Girodo networked with law enforcement officials facing similar prospects in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico, but they never resolved the killings.
"I got calls from second-, third-generation ranchers who never called when their cows were killed by lightning, predators or even poisonings," Girodo says. "There's been a lot of ridicule about these reports, but if you don't get
out of the office, if you don't go out into the field, you have no right to criticize them."
Girodo says he's seen cattle with hide scrolled up from shoulder to neck, cattle with every bone in their bodies
broken, cattle wasted beneath trees with shattered branches and limbs overhead, "as if they'd been dropped from a considerable height."
A few ranchers have reported seeing black, noiseless helicopters with opaque windows prowling the skies near
their property before or after mutilations. He says the mutilations stopped on one ranch after a cowboy fired his
shotgun at a chopper that touched down in a pasture. But no
arrests have ever been made.
"These things come and go; they just move on," says Girodo, who last visited a mutilation site in November 1995. "It's not something you worry about unless it happens to you. Now, it looks like you folks are dealing with it."
Recently, the most widely publicized mutilations occurred at the Barton Ranch in Red Bluff, Calif., where Bill and
Jean Barton lost 11 cattle in 17 months, the last one in March. A fourth-generation rancher and former California Cattlemen's Association officer, Jean Barton says she's cooperating with the media in an effort to encourage other ranchers to come foward. Barton says the mutilations are underreported.
One of her strangest discoveries was last October, when she studied a cow "whose horn was embedded so far in the
ground, you couldn't get it out, like she'd been dropped." A month later, she approached a dazed but unharmed cow who had just given birth, idling over her dead calf.
"(The calf) was still covered in afterbirth," Barton reports. "She still had her sexual organs, but her spinal
cord was showing through a hole in her neck, half her ear was gone, she had a hole in her loin, and another hole where her intestines were coming out. And there was no blood. The flesh around the wound was pale, pale pink, almost as white as a tablecloth.
"And of course, there were no tracks, no tire marks
anywhere, just like all the others."
Microwave evidence
Lately, in a protocol developed by Linda Howe, Barton - and other ranchers - have begun sending grass samples to W.C. Levengood for evaluation in Grass Lake, Mich.
Semi-retired and formerly a faculty member at the
University of Michigan's Institute of Science and Technology, Levengood owns seven patents on seed development. His research on grains affected inside controversial crop circles has been published in two peer-review science journals.
Levengood says he's studied grass samples gathered from mutilation sites at controlled distances from the carcasses. Ninety percent of those samples, he says, show significant alterations in the mitochondria, the rod-like structures that regulate respiration. The closer the grass to the animal, the more profound the changes.
"We're seeing a lot of indications of microwave damage, a transient, very rapid, high-heating energy. The
mitochondria is burning itself up, biochemically. How this is done, we don't know yet," says Levengood. "You never get two cases that are exactly the same."
Levengood doesn't biopsy bovine tissue, but the results of other researchers - most prominently, Colorado pathologist John Altshuler - lead him to disavow the term "mutilation."
"Mutilation implies random ripping and tearing. That's obviously not what's going on here," he says. "I call them
bovine excision sites. There's a precision at work here. It's very strange and very interesting."
Altshuler's work is detailed in Howe's books, "An Alien Harvest" and "Glimpses of Other Realities". He reports on
"vacuolar changes which result from tissue cooking or exposure to high temperatures, probably above 300 degrees F."
"Taking all the microscopic findings into account, one would have to conclude that the surgical procedure
performed on these animals took place quickly, probably in a minute or two, and utilized high temperature heat (e.g., laser) as a cutting source applied on a fine probe or cutting instrument."
When contacted at his Denver office, Altshuler declined to elaborate.
"I'm comfortable with my findings, but I'm trying to rebuild my practice after two years (in academia)," he says. "I do not cherish the publicity associated with this subject."
Florida steps up efforts
Whether Florida cattle exhibit similar wounds remains to be seen. Valid analysis is contingent upon acquiring fresh tissue, preferably within 48 hours of death, Howe says.
"Taking a grown cow to a state lab - that could be a little problematic," says Hill. "You're talking about something
that weighs 800, 1,200 pounds.
"But we're just getting started, and we've just begun looking at certain things. We're going to do as professional a job as possible, and we're going to go as far back as necessary to find other incidents of this nature."
Gilbert Tucker called the police to his west Cocoa ranch "sometime in the '70s" when it happened to him, but it
didn't do any good then, either.
A cattle rancher since 1946, the 79-year-old cowboy was startled to find two yearling bulls dead in his pasture
within a week to 10 days of each other.
"In both cases, we found 'em before the buzzards got there," Tucker says. "The first one had his testicles
whacked off; the other one had his tongue cut out, way down deep. And that's all they did, nothing else. No sign of blood, no other wounds, no meat taken.
"I'll be damned if I know what happened to those bulls. All I know is, it never happened again."
By Billy Cox
April 19, 1997