October 29, 1979. The desert. A husk of a cow lies on the ground. Blood, eyes, tongue, rectum, and organs removed. An empty sack seemingly dropped from the sky, no tracks leading to or from its final resting place. Bloodless wounds, all cauterized by lasers. Circling scavengers who don’t dare approach the corpse, as if the ground itself has been cursed.
These macabre images aren’t from a horror movie. They’re from New Mexico. This was the scene Sam Dunlap described to the Tucumcari police.
The unexplained mutilation of cattle and other livestock is as much a part of the Northern New Mexico landscape as green chile enchiladas — but a mutilated cow is an enchilada that’s all tortilla and no cheese. There are dozens of reports of cattle mutilations in the FBI’s databases, obtained by FOIA requests. The reports detail mutilated cows found in various terrain — dropped in the bottom of an arroyo or splayed on a lonely patch of dirt surrounded by cacti. Though we may be tempted to look away from such horrors, we must sometimes walk these dark paranormal passages to put together the whole picture, to uncover the truth.
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Hi, I’m Dr. Howard, host of the Alien Hour YouTube show, paranormal researcher, and doctor of veterinary medicine. I’m often asked how these fields of research relate, and there is no greater intersection between them than that which exists in the phenomenon of cattle mutilation.
During veterinary school, I unknowingly had a premonition of this disturbing occurrence while in pathology lab, where we performed necropsies to study disease. Oftentimes, the animal whose anatomy we examined was a cow. Pathology lab took place in a large room with cement floors and stainless steel operating tables, where young vet students like myself observed dead animals, much as alien scientists observe their human specimens. Above our heads, steel chains were secured to a circular track, by which we hung each carcass. We’d surgically remove the heart, liver, brain, abomasum, and other three stomachs, then everything else from the body. Rubber boots were a necessity; afterwards we hosed down the room to wash away the excess blood, which spiraled thickly down the drains. What can I say, it was messy work, but that’s a vet’s life. Just the other day I came home from the clinic with a poop in my pocket, but that’s a topic for another article. In vet school we mutilated cattle for a purpose: to understand what killed each animal. We cut them up, like I said, to learn about disease. What we didn’t do was sneak onto some rancher’s land, murder healthy animals, and carry their organs home as party favors. However, someone — or something — is doing this very thing.
There are four possible motivations I see for the mutilation of cattle: to study the animal, to test advanced weaponry, to make a ritual sacrifice, or to seek the sick pleasure of torturing a defenseless being. I believe three possible suspects could be behind such activity: aliens, the government, and Satanic cults. The third we can dismiss immediately as pure nonsense. The mutilations appear to be performed utilizing secret technologies which I do not believe these cults possess. You might argue that the strange incisions and exsanguinations are performed using Black Magick, but I assume these cults have more interesting uses for their arcane spells.
This leaves us with two other options: the government or aliens. The government is certainly a possibility. They have the tools and the technology, but only because they’ve reverse engineered that which they’ve stolen from extraterrestrials. Some of my fellow researchers believe the government tests classified laser weapons on random herds of Angus. I don’t buy it. The government could easily purchase its own animals (given its massive military budget) and test the weapons within the privacy of the Dulce Base, or some other classified site out here in the Southwest where they conceal their dirtiest deeds. It’s more probable that the government performs cattle mutilations as a form of psy ops: disinformation tactics to distract and confuse UFO researchers and keep us away from specific sites. But in the interest of Occam’s razor, I must move on.
Aliens. We know they have the technology — lassos, lasers, some kind of blood pump, and other tools our human minds can’t comprehend. But what do they want with our cows? Some would say that they’ve come to research the ungulates, but what’s with the anal fixation? Do they take them back to their ships for further analysis, or to pair with fried calamari? And really, this has been going on for decades. How many cows does an ET need to study before graduating from bovine university?
There’s another theory I’d like to propose, one which I find much more appealing. We all know that ancient humans performed animal sacrifice to appease their gods. But what if these “gods” weren’t gods at all? What if they were extraterrestrial visitors, just looking for a Double-Double? What I’m proposing is this: aliens love beef, too. And now that we’ve stopped our sacrifice to the space gods, there’s no one to conveniently deliver meat to their saucer doors. So tomorrow, say, our ET visitors return and, finding no fresh sacrifice, they must perform their own. To the ETs’ dismay, modern humans only ritualistically remove cattle organs for the cold, steel altar of the necropsy table in the chamber of the pathology lab. What they really want is meat on the propane altar of the grill.
I have a message for the aliens, which I will be sending telepathically in addition to writing here: I understand. Cows are the most delicious things in the universe. But you don’t have to treat them like this when you want a burger. There are free-range cattle who live full lives and are slaughtered as humanely as possible.
And if you need a quick bite here in New Mexico, there’s always the drive-thru at Blake’s Lotaburger.
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Dr. Howard is a ufologist, veterinarian, and the host of Alien Hour. In 2014, while attending a veterinary conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Dr. Howard had a chance encounter that opened his eyes to the fact that he is a lifelong alien abductee. Since then he has devoted himself to an experimental form of ufology, often looking for overlaps between his veterinary knowledge and the mysteries of the unknown. In addition to hosting the Alien Hour YouTube show, Dr. Howard has given lectures on paranormal topics at venues around the world.
Adrian Pijoan transmits his work from somewhere deep in the New Mexico desert. Sightings of Adrian have been reported at UFO festivals, Bigfoot research conferences, and in the comments sections on the weird side of YouTube. Adrian investigates locations in what he calls the paranormal landscape — places like UFO crash sites, haunted hotels, and Bigfoot sighting hotspots. Through video, performance, net art, and installation, he explores the relationships between the paranormal landscape and the stories and cultures that emerge around it. True or fictitious, these stories are an important form of contemporary folklore inextricably tied to place. Alien Hour is the realm of his persona Dr. Howard, a version of himself with all skepticism exorcised.