Cattle mutilations in Wyoming and the West…

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

Wyoming had reports of mutilated livestock in Newcastle in the Bridger Valley in Uinta County and in Sublette County. There were maimed horses in Meeteetse and Carbon County. Two years later, there was a report of a heifer outside Casper found dead under similar circumstances.

In the years immediately following the Vietnam War and Watergate, suspects included the U.S. military, some of whom suspected of conducting experiments or tissue collection, satanic cults or UFO visits.

Attempts by a Nebraska senator to involve the FBI were met with hesitation and reluctance from the agency, which only fueled speculation. The mystery has lingered for decades, still scaring farmers and former law enforcement officers as Halloween approaches, reminding them of a real-life horror they experienced.

“In our area it lasted three years,” former Uinta County Sheriff Leonard Hysell told Cowboy State Daily in an interview. “The first year we had it, it was an ungodly amount, a lot.”

While the headlines died down in the 1980s, reports of periodic cattle mutilations persisted. In Texas, six cows were mutilated in a similar manner in 2023. Mutilations that occurred in eastern Oregon communities in recent years were profiled in Netflix’s latest season of “Unsolved Mysteries.”

Current Executive Vice President of the Wyoming Livestock Growers Association, Jim Magagna, and Wyoming State Veterinarian, Dr. Hollie Hasel, said they are aware of no reports of incidents of mutilation in the state since they took on their respective roles.

The mutilations begin

But in the seventies the losses were real and ranchers and law enforcement found no culprit or motive for the grotesque mutilations in the Cowboy State and the rest of the country.

The Casper Star-Tribune reported on October 26, 1975 that suspected cattle mutilations exceeded 45 cows, with 10 in Sublette County and 16 in Uinta County. On September 30, the newspaper reported a calf north of Gillette that had its genitals cut off and its stomach severed 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 tracks of predators or humans.

For Hysell, then Uinta County undersheriff, the incidents represented the most bizarre cases he investigated in his 47-year career in law enforcement, including 20 years in Uinta County.

“We only took the fresh ones, anything that was more than 24 hours old, we tried not to speculate on that,” he said. “We really tried to investigate fresh murders. We have collected a large number of them. One farmer alone had sixteen head, six in one night in one field. Now the predators don’t do that.”

Evidence of helicopters

While many news stories talk about the lack of evidence and leads surrounding the murders, Hysell said he found certain evidence in some locations that led to his suspicions about the cause – and it involved helicopters.

During the period when livestock were found mutilated, there were credible reports of military-style helicopters in the area and, on one occasion, three in different locations. Hysell said the plane had no numbers on the side, used no lights and was only seen at dusk.

“We found a lot of rotor wax around the carcasses, we found the tracks of the landing skids,” he said. “That made me believe it was something more complicated. And predators wouldn’t want anything to do with those carcasses. Birds wouldn’t peck on it. We have never had such incidents before and never again. If they were predators, why didn’t it continue? That just didn’t happen.”

On September 3, 1975, the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph reported that El Paso County Undersheriff Gary Gibbs pointed to a satanic cult.

“They are nomadic people. In 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 across the country,” he was quoted as saying. “Some people laugh at the idea, but we have worked very hard on the problem and we have definitive proof. We want to arrest 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 he knows were flying in and around his county at the time. But he does know that the federal government and state agencies have been extremely reluctant to help sheriff’s departments across the West. And that goes for Wyoming too.

“The state crime labs would have nothing to do with it, either in Wyoming or Utah,” he said. “I heard from other sheriff’s offices that this was a case they were experiencing in all their states.”

FBI file

An FBI file on the cattle mutilations reveals letters sent by Nebraska Sen. Carl Curtis to FBI Director Clarence M. Kelly in 1974 requesting the federal agency’s help in solving the crimes.

“This will refer to my previous August 21st letter to you regarding the series of incidents stretching from Oklahoma to Nebraska involving the dismemberment of livestock in some sort of strange witchcraft cult,” Curtis wrote. “I wonder if your good offices have initiated an investigation into this situation in Nebraska or any of the other states experiencing similar acts of livestock mutilation.”

The FBI director responded on September 10, 1974 that he had an agent investigate the case and it appeared that “no federal law within the jurisdiction of the FBI had been violated.”

In 1979, Senator Harrison Schmitt of New Mexico succeeded in getting the Senate Judiciary Committee to include language in its report directing the FBI to “continue its investigation into the cattle mutilations that have occurred in New Mexico and elsewhere.”

Retired FBI agent Kenneth Rommel led an investigation into mutilated cattle on a native reservation in New Mexico and concluded that predators were to blame.

“Most credible sources have attributed this damage to the normal activity of predators and scavengers. However, certain segments of the population have attributed 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 did submit flakes of material that appeared on top of a Taos, NM. pickup truck in July 1978 after a UFO reportedly hovered above. The FBI lab concluded that it was white enamel paint, typical of exterior home paint, and that the particles “appeared to be coming from a wood substrate.”

Predator conclusion ‘not valid’

Hysell said he did not accept the FBI’s conclusion about predators.

“I’ve never met so many FBI agents who knew much about predators, at least not the four-legged kind,” he said. “I definitely thought that conclusion was not valid.”

Hysell said he suspected the government was involved in the mutilations, possibly due to a chemical or biological accident, and that testing needed to be done to see how extensively the material had spread.

“There were mutilations wherever air, water or food could enter or leave the bodies,” he said.

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

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

A December 8, 1994, congressional report from the Committee on Veterans Affairs and Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV stated that the test site had been the site where various chemical and biological agents were tested.

In 1968, the report stated that 6,400 sheep died near the facility due to “the deliberate release of a deadly nerve agent from an aircraft.”

“Initially, the Ministry of Defense denied any responsibility for the accident… However, the nerve agent VX was identified when the poisoned sheep were autopsied, making it clear that the deaths were not caused by pesticides,” the report said. “Eventually the Department of Defense reimbursed the farmers for their animals.”

‘Simulant testing’

After the 1968 deaths, the report noted that the Department of Defense developed “simulant” tests. But during the “45 years” of open-air testing, “the military stopped using a variety of simulants when they realized they were not as safe as thought,” the report said.

Although the mass mutilations of the mid-1970s have stopped, reports of similar mutilations continue to occur. 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 cross cow was discovered in Madison County with its tongue removed by a “straight, clean cut with apparent precision along the jawline. Scavengers did not touch the body.

In neighboring Brazos and Robertson counties, five additional cows were discovered with their anuses and genitals removed, in addition to their tongues.

The investigator into the Madison County incident told Cowboy State Daily she could not speak to the media without permission from the sheriff’s office. A message left with the sheriff’s office was not responded to within the stated timeframe.

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

“I felt like we were being controlled with the news about it,” he said. “I’ll tell you this at least in one case, I won’t tell you what condition it was in. A person working at the crime lab was told to stop, that they would no longer accept samples. and they had to keep quiet about it.

Valley Killingbeck can be reached at [email protected].