I FIRST HEARD ABOUT cattle mutilations when a round of them popped up in Oregon. The details, I need to warn you, are graphic. In 2019, five bulls were found dead in a wooded area, fifteen miles from the nearest road. They had no wounds except missing genitals and tongues. There were no tracks or signs of struggle, ranchers said. Then it happened again. And again. And every time the news reported on it, someone mentioned that this wasn’t the first time unexplained cattle mutilations had occurred.

These cases were new, but the mystery was more than fifty years old.

The stories first hit Kansas newspapers in 1973. In June of that year, a heifer was found dead at the edge of a wheat field. Her right ear had been cut off, the right rear quarter was gone, and some of her flank was missing as well. It couldn’t have been coyotes, the sheriff said. There were signs of “butchering.” Two weeks later, a dead steer was found with his right ear missing as well. Both animals had left the main herd and were lying in remote pastures.

It wasn’t long before the count was up to four animals in two different counties: all dead of mysterious causes; all missing the same ear; all of them with their tongue cut out. The job looked professional, a sheriff said, insisting the same person (or people) were behind all of it. By the end of 1973, roughly forty cows had been found dead under apparently mysterious circumstances. Every time, their bodies were missing tongues, sex organs, and a bit of ear. Very little meat was taken.

Cases continued and soon began appearing in nearby Nebraska, where people reported seeing unidentified helicopters in the area around the same time. Now the cattle weren’t just missing random body parts—taken with an almost surgical precision, people reported—they were drained of all blood too.

Then Colorado and Iowa and on throughout the West until eleven states in total had reported cattle being killed and mutilated. Livestock groups offered thousands of dollars in reward money for anyone who could help them catch the criminals. In 1975, national media picked up the story. A Colorado senator contacted the FBI to ask them to investigate. In 1979, U.S. Attorney General Griffin Bell said of the case documents, “the materials sent me indicate the existence of one of the strangest phenomenons in my memory.”

ONCE THERE WAS A COW. He was a tall bull, not the strongest of the herd. As the rest of the cattle grazed together on the range, he wandered alone, bathed in moonlight. The heifers and their calves huddled up to sleep. The bull strayed.

This is a warning to you. Stay close; stay safe. Don’t let the fire burn too low.

People came after midnight, casting their shadows onto the scrub brushes, rocky dirt, and tall grasses. The cultists came to the range to do their dark rites. They worshipped Satan or something else equally sinister.

Impossible, you say.

How can it be impossible if I read it in an article that quoted a student who heard it from a friend who knew the cult who did it? You heard what happened with the Manson Family in California. Those poor people asleep in their homes.

The bull would be their sacrifice. The cultists killed him and took pieces from his body. They removed the blood until not a single drop was left.

It ended, thank God, it ended, when the sunlight touched the bull’s flesh.

Humans created the evil and then created a monster we could scapegoat. We can’t help but retell these tales over and over again.

IN OREGON, THOSE SAME PHRASES uttered decades earlier surfaced again in 2019. It was like different storytellers repeating the same folktale around a campfire. Cuts made with surgical precision. No scavengers would touch the bodies. There was no blood. Missing tongues. Missing sex organs. No sign of prints. No sign of struggle. I was fascinated by the wild tales people came up with to explain it all. Why were the original cases referred to the FBI? Why had politicians publicly involved themselves in something inspiring so many paranormal theories?

I read articles about the cases, books. “It’s some religious cult going through the country,” Paul Jones, a county sheriff in Texas told The Monitor in 1975. He described how the cultists had to drink blood and eat the cattle’s sex organs. “It’s just got to be.” Even the New York Times ran articles quoting the theory that satanic cults were to blame.

In 1980, an environmental journalist made a documentary about the cases that hinted at an extraterrestrial explanation. Then she won an Emmy for it. Other people preferred to blame a shadowy government program using helicopters in the night to snatch up cattle for mysterious testing and study.

Each explanation was stranger than the last. They even included Sasquatch and a mythic creature at least known for draining the blood out of livestock: the chupacabra. People believed—still believe—the mutilations are the work of some dark force. The stories spread from one person to another through news, television, conversations between neighbors.

It made me think of the time my mother had dinner with a man who’d spent his life looking for Sasquatch. She came away from the encounter convinced the cryptid was real. “He has hours of audio and video,” she told me.

“But do any of them actually show Bigfoot?”

She demurred. It was all evidence. Why would anyone spend their life looking for something if it wasn’t real?

Where there’s smoke, surely, there must be fire.

SO THERE WAS THIS HEIFER who walked away from the herd. She had a calf, and she left him there mooing. It was a full moon kind of night. Maybe she was feeling restless the way you sometimes do. She lay down on a patch of sun-warmed dirt to sleep unencumbered.

The ship made impossible zigzags in the sky. This is nothing like those satellites you see now. Stranger. Impossible. The ship settled above the heifer so the aliens in it could come down to Earth. They moved so lightly you couldn’t see a single footstep.

Beaming her into the sky? That’s stuff from key chains and B movies. But the aliens are sophisticated. They have tech we can’t even dream of. So they paralyze the heifer with a drug before she even wakes up enough for her brain to tell her to run. They inject her with an anticoagulant and lift her body, pump her veins until they collect every drop of blood. You’ve never seen a surgeon do such good work.

Why don’t they take her with them when they go? I can’t explain why they do anything. Maybe it felt kinder to put her back rather than let anyone wonder why she vanished into the night.

MAYBE THERE’S SOMETHING DIFFERENT about the cattle industry. Plenty of pigs and chickens and pets have died suddenly and without struggle but they’ve never led to a national conspiracy theory in the same way these mutilations have gripped us. People accept that it’s likely disease or another illness. It’s like how most people are more scared of plane crashes than riding in a car or having a swimming pool in the backyard, though the latter are more dangerous. Some things are primed to scare us. Some things seem more haunted than others. A suspected mutilation—and the unknown culprit behind it—is more terrifying than a death.

Unlike many other domesticated animals, cattle in the West spend a large portion of their time on the range. It’s expensive to feed them hay year-round. Each cow needs as much as five acres to graze, depending on the quality of forage—a lot of space to give over  to a creature we’re raising just so we can kill them. Worried only that someone or something else will kill them first.

Ranchers and cowboys collect them from paddocks and nearby fields and drive them out to their summer homes. Some of this land is privately owned though millions of acres throughout the country belong to the public: owned by everyone and no one. This is usually where the mysterious deaths, the mutilations, occur.

Large swaths of the West remain mostly wild, undeveloped and untamed. When I drive across this part of the country, I can’t always tell if the formations in the distance are nearby hills or faraway mountains. The cattle I see grazing give me something to orient to. These are the kind of places that look pretty enough to feel safe during the day but at night make me realize just how alone I am. The kind of places where I might discover I don’t have a signal if I need to call for help.

EVERY HORROR MOVIE TEACHES US that evil sticks to places where evil has been done. And plenty of evil has been done in the name of the cattle industry. Before we began driving cattle across the West in the 1800s, Americans viewed most of it as wasteland. Cattle were brought in to convert the useless grass into leather and steak, maybe tame the wild out of it too. Settlers moving west decided the Plains tribes and the bison had to go.

As Christopher Knowlton writes in Cattle Kingdom, the native grazers liked to scratch against new telegraph poles until they knocked down the lines and sometimes got in the way of railroads—blocking tracks or derailing trains. People gleefully shot bison from trains. Massacres masquerading as hunting parties weren’t uncommon. If settlers took anything at all from the animals, they took the tongues and humps. They left the carcasses to rot.

Soldiers were encouraged to use bison as target practice. The government gave hunters free ammunition. A hundred years later, cattle mutilations began appearing in the same part of the country where bison once roamed and were also killed and mutilated.

The American West certainly has enough ghosts haunting it. When cowboys pushed cattle across the range, they huddled around campfires to tell stories and keep the night away. Something lurked in the dark even then. Cattle are still moved this way. And stories are still told. Yet, so often the thing we’re most scared of now is each other.

Maybe this is why we’re inclined to believe that the cattle deaths are mutilations. Folklorist David J. Puglia wrote that legendary monsters “act as societal barometers, reflecting our collective hopes, fears, and evolving dynamics.” They’re more than good stories. Mothman was first seen outside an abandoned explosives factory that produced World War II bombs, where unused TNT still leaks into the soil. The legend was supercharged the following year when a bridge collapse killed forty-six people—just after Mothman was sighted again. The first Godzilla movie was made a decade after atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima. The chupacabra legend started in the 1990s, when animals began dying during a prolonged drought made worse by climate change. It’s hard to tell if these cryptids are a warning or punishment. Maybe they’re both—like a thousand-year flood or a wildfire caused by a downed power line. They might be rare events or the first of many, depending on how we react.

Either way, humans created the evil and then created a monster we could scapegoat. We can’t help but retell these tales over and over again.

I SOUGHT OTHER EXPLANATIONS for the cattle mutilations, unable to believe the theories but sure that there must be an interesting truth behind such a widespread panic. Not ghosts but something real to tie it all together. Michael Goleman, an agricultural historian and now associate dean of humanities at Somerset Community College in Kentucky, wrote a comprehensive paper on their history. Early on, he discovered that cases rose and fell with economic patterns impacting the industry. “A lot of the ranchers reporting these mutilations were the ones that were hurting the most from the economic conditions,” he told me.

The Great Stagflation—when high unemployment and increasing prices occurred simultaneously—doubled the price of soybean meal from the end of 1972 to the next year. Beef prices rose to account for these costs. Americans were eating more than eighty pounds of beef per capita at the time, and families were up in arms. Hamburger Helper was suddenly beyond their budgets. Responding to consumer pressure, President Richard Nixon froze the wholesale and retail prices of beef at artificially low levels from April through September 1973.

Cattlemen, already hurting from the price of feed, waited to slaughter their cows until they could sell the meat for more money. So many held their cows back from slaughter that meatpacking plants were left without business. One hundred and forty plants closed for good by August.

When ranchers finally decided to slaughter their cattle again, they found fewer places to process them and the cattle were too old, the meat less desirable. Grain prices kept rising. Ranchers, their business and way of life, felt assaulted from all sides. The first cattle mutilation cases were reported as things worsened, gaining more media attention in the fall of that year.

Were things just so tense that every cattle death felt like an affront instead of a random occurrence? Humans often think this way in a crisis. We can’t protect ourselves from bad luck, but we can go out and hunt a killer.

Michael Goleman said the 1692 Salem witch trials are another example of bad luck leading to hysteria. Many scholars have pointed out Salem was in a period of crisis. There was an influx of outsiders, illness, threats of attack, as well as infighting: tensions simmered to a boil.

“They had an underlying belief in a spiritual realm and dark forces that are roaming around,” Goleman said of Salem’s residents. It wasn’t farfetched to think the devil possessed someone’s soul.

Or, in our story, that a dead cow is proof of something sinister.

THE CALF TURNED UP DEAD. Perfectly healthy when the rancher checked on him three days before, and there he is dead. It’s heartbreaking. The ranch dog won’t touch the corpse, and he’ll roll in everything. Birds had been all over the area before and then, poof, they were gone. Wouldn’t come back. Animals always know.

The calf had been cut all over, poor little one, with marks so precise they had to be done with a laser.

Neighbors had seen helicopters flying dark in the area a few nights before. No flight records logged. We all know who has the power to fly dark ops like that. 

Why would the government do this?

Why wouldn’t they?

They already did just about everything they could to put us out of business. They can’t help but lie. Look at Watergate. And then there was that business with the sheep. The Army sprayed them with nerve gas. Six thousand head dead just like that, and the base would have kept denying it if someone hadn’t released the papers.

It’s unbelievable? Well, unbelievable things are in the news every day.

We pass on conspiracy theories and ghost stories when we need something to believe in—half purpose and half explanation.

IN OREGON, CATTLE MUTILATION CASES were reported in the same part of the state where Ammon Bundy occupied a wildlife refuge because of fights over grazing rights on public land just a few years earlier. Again, ranchers felt angry and powerless and recast what were likely natural or predator deaths into something alarming. We pass on conspiracy theories and ghost stories when we need something to believe in—half purpose and half explanation.

Multiple studies have found people turn to conspiracy theories when they’re anxious or feel disempowered. Psychologists say urban legends that prompt feelings of disgust—like one involving graphic descriptions of mutilated cattle—are more likely to spread.

Even in the healthiest herds, cattle die. Regardless of the size of the ranch, most herds of beef cattle have 1 to 2 percent losses in the adult population every year. The two hundred mysterious cattle deaths that took place in 1975 could have been the mark of human sadistic killers. Or they could have been a reflection of the fact that 1975, the peak of the cattle mutilation panic, was also the peak of the U.S. beef industry. That year, there were 132 million head of cattle, more than any year before or since. Ranchers had more cattle, so ranchers had more cattle losses too.

But we’d still rather have something to be scared of than admit we’re not totally in control. UFOs and cults and government programs might be recent explanations for dead livestock but ranchers have historically found another culprit to blame: wolves.

Carter Niemeyer worked as a predator trapper for the Fish and Wildlife Service for many years. Part of his job involved determining how cattle had actually died—often contrary to what ranchers claimed. “I was amazed that conservative, God-fearing rural folks could conjure up such absurd ideas about how a farm animal became dead,” he wrote in his memoir,Wolfer. The livestock industry often claims depredation numbers from wolves and other predators at far higher numbers than what is verifiable.

With our sturdy homes and lights and fences and guns and cars, the call of a wolf isn’t nearly as chilling to hear as it was for our ancestors. Yet we still prefer fiction to science.

From the beginning, the 1973 news articles about cattle mutilations blamed cults or aliens or the government. But reporters also noted that experts who necropsied the bodies found nothing out of the ordinary. Even when the evidence was right there, theorists couldn’t let go of the thing that felt true—death is mysterious and out of our control.

The cows “drained of blood”? Simply a result of how blood coagulates and settles in the body after death. The strange scalpel marks were just sharp animal teeth. The fact that the mouth, udders, anus, sex organs, or face went missing every time wasn’t proof of a conspiracy at work, only that predators prefer to chew away at the softest parts of the animal before they tackle a cow’s tough hide. Some cattle were found with blackleg bacteria or signs of bloat, both of which can be fatal. Over and over, veterinary experts said the cattle likely died of natural causes and were predated on afterward. Scavengers don’t attack the body the way something like a wolf might.

Still, the panic continued.

WHEN THE SHERIFF KICKED the dead heifer, a swarm of flies came off it. She hadn’t been dead longer than a day. Experts say it’s just predation. As if animals come and go without leaving tracks behind them. As if teeth could mimic scalpels.

The sheriff cut a skin sample to send off for testing. His cuts into the dead hide were coarse and jagged. It didn’t look anything like what they’d done to the cow.

I saw a documentary in which an expert said, and I quote, that there was “no technology on Earth that could drain the blood from a cow.” But the blood was gone.

So how do you explain it?

I know what I believe.

I’LL GIVE THEM THIS, the images of the mutilations do look strange. When I think of a predator eating prey, I think of animals pulling meat from bones, blood and skin flying until there’s only enough left for scavengers. The animals in the photos don’t look like that. They lie on their sides, untouched except a couple holes in their body or the skin over their chins stripped away to expose teeth and bones. It’s like something out of a horror movie.

Earlier this year, I walked in Patagonia through an area where warnings were posted: be on the lookout for vacunos salvajes, or wild cattle. The signs had silhouettes of angry bulls ready to charge. I translated it in my mind to “savage cows”—aggressive, angry beasts that might be waiting around the next bend. It didn’t matter that the cows might be either calm or aggressive: wandering in this foreign country I felt danger. I constantly scanned the horizon, listening for any snuffle or hoofbeat.

I didn’t see any live cows but I did see a few carcasses—long decomposed and disarticulated—and cattle skulls with long horns hung up from trees by some previous hiker. It felt like a bad omen, eerie.

Even when it’s natural, death always feels like a crime. Someone dies and we wish it had happened differently, that we’d had more time, that they’d gone peacefully sooner. We’re not used to seeing death, and when we stumble onto it in the wild world, the nakedness of it, the rot, the lack of burial is all wrong, wrong, wrong.

It was just a skeleton.

I was ready to run all the same.

There’s no monster more terrifying than an ending.

THE STORY HAS A LIFE OF ITS OWN. Though reports have slowed since the 1970s, they haven’t disappeared. Every year or so, the news brings a rush of attention back to this mystery that’s been “unsolved” since the 1970s, maybe because people refuse to believe the solution. Something must be out there. Danger has to be lurking in the dark. I think Mulder of The X-Files was right when he said, “I want to believe.”

Between 2019 and 2021, at least seven new cattle mutilations were reported in central Oregon. There have been more suspected cases across the country since. Wheeler County sheriff Jeremiah Holmes was called out to investigate several of the Oregon mutilations. “There’s a world of difference between a predator-killed cow and a natural death cow,” he said when I asked him about the scene. “I wouldn’t call it a mutilation if I didn’t think it was a mutilation.” He should know; he manages a ranch and cowboyed on a few others. I asked him if he had any suspicions, but he didn’t want to tell me who he thought was behind the mutilations. Sheriff Holmes doesn’t deal with theories, only facts. The facts are also these: if a farmer is calling about a dead cow, it’s because of suspected mutilation. Ranchers, Sheriff Holmes told me, don’t call the sheriff when a cow dies of natural causes. They take the loss. (Suspected wolf killings get a call to another agency entirely.) When law enforcement arrives to a mutilation case, they’re expecting a scene that’s eerie, unexplainable. Is it any wonder that’s what the sheriff sees when he gets there? If I went looking for a giant mythic creature in the forest and came across a large depression in the dirt, I’d want to believe it was a footprint too.