The 'Harvest' Continues

by Linda Moulton Howe

In 1989, there were so many cattle mutilations in southern Idaho that Bear Lake County Sheriff Brent Bunn told me, "We haven't seen anything like this since the 1970s." Sheriff Bunn sent me 16 neatly-typed "Investigation Reports" about cattle mutilations that had taken place in his county between May and December. Over half occurred in a remote valley called Nounan. Only eighty people live there. Ranching is their main income source, and cattle are precious. Disease and predators are old and well-understood enemies.

What descended on Nounan, Idaho in the summer and fall of 1989 was not understood-and it scared people. Bloodless and precise cuts-that's what bothers people. Officer Gregg Athay wrote in his mutilation report, "There were no visible signs of the cause of death. It appeared that only the soft tissues (nose, lips and tongue) were gone off the head and four nipples off the bag. Again there was no blood on the hair and ground."

No veterinarian report was made on that cow. But a month earlier, Dr. Charles Merrell at the Bear Lake Animal Hospital examined a dead Hereford cow. Dr. Merrell wrote after his examination: "Some time between approximately 8 p.m. (August 31, 1989) and 7 a.m. 1 September, the anus, vagina to include uterus and ovaries and all four teats (one teat deeply incised, the others shallow cuts) were removed by knife cuts around these tissues. There were no signs of injury and no blood to be found on the ground. " A neighbor, Bernice Laughter, said she saw lights in that area about 2 a.m. on September 1.

Disks reported

Throughout the history of animal mutilations, since 1967, there have been numerous eyewitness accounts of large, glowing disks or "silent helicopters " over pastures where dead animals are later found. One Waco, Texas rancher said he encountered two four-foot tall, light green-colored "creatures " with large, black, slanted eyes, carrying a calf which was later found dead and mutilated. In 1983, a Missouri couple watched through binoculars as two small beings in tight-fitting silver suits worked on a cow in a nearby pasture. The alien heads were large and white in color. Nearby, a tall, green-skinned "lizard man" stood glaring with eyes slit by vertical pupils like a crocodiles's. Several hypnosis sessions with various UFO abductees have produced information suggesting that the alien intruders are using the tissues and blood fluids for genetic experimentation and sustenance.

One Missouri woman, who has experienced repeated encounters with small grey beings that have large, black eyes, sid the creatures told her, "We use substances from cows in an essential biochemical process for our survival." In the 1989 continuing harvest, over half of the Idaho mutilations were young calves. One mutilated calf, found December 24, north of Downey, Idaho, was found lying on its back with the navel, rectum and genitals neatly cut out of the steer's white belly. No blood was found anywhere. (See photo, p. 18.) This steer calf was taken for an autopsy to Dr. Chris Oats, D.V.M., at the Hawthorne Animal Hospital. Dr. Oats checked all the vital organs and was unable to determine the cause of death. During the autopsy, a sharp cut was found in the right chest area, and Dr. Oats discovered that a main artery had been severed under the chest wound.

She was surprised that "the steer had lost a large amount of blood, but [she] could not understand where it went to. " There was no blood on the steer or on the ground. Dr. Oats also determined that the steer had not been dragged by the neck or tied up around the feet.

Residents of southern Idaho weren't alone in their fear and con- fusion about the mutilations. William Veenhuizen woke up on July 17, 1989 to find his finest cow mutilated about 100 yards from his farmhouse in Maple Valley, Washington, southeast of Seattle. The six-year-old female was due to calve in about three weeks. But mutilators had cut away a smooth oval section of the cow's mouth, removed a section of jaw with teeth, excised the tongue and cut out the entire udder, vagina and rectal area. The calf was still inside the belly.

Something woke Mr. Veenhuizen up around I a.m. that day, he remembers. He even put his shoes on and went outside, but he couldn't see or hear anything out of the ordinary. He was so upset after the mutilation, he started keeping the rest of his animals inside the barn. "A neighbor said to me that coyotes did it," he said, "but I said the coyotes don't have that sharp a knife."

Bill Veenhuizen wasn't the only farmer in Maple Valley, Washington having mutilation problems. On Sunday, November 11, two female sheep were found with their sexual organs removed. The Hicks-Raburn King County Police found small holes on the carcasses that they concluded might be BB gun pellet wounds, but no pellets were found.

Mystery technology

Another major question: Had the blood been drained from all those animals without cutting them? If alien life forms are responsible, and blood is a fluid they need for sustenance, do the aliens have a technology which can transfer molecules of blood from within a living system and leave mysteriously dead animals behind having no cuts at all: The same question might apply to the hundreds of wild horses which were found dead in Nevada in 1989.

In November, 1989, in Red Cloud, Nebraska, rancher Ron Bartels found a large, 1,000 lb. Chianina cow dead and mutilated. The Franklin County Sheriff Department investigated, and veterinarian Carl Guthrie, D.V.M., was asked to do a necropsy. In his report, he stated that a four-inch straight incision had been made over the cervical trachea. Beyond that cut inside the animal, over eight inches of trachea and esophagus had been surgically removed- "The skin over the abdomen was removed in a clear, demarcated line-no musculature disturbed," he noted. And the rectum and vagina were cored out.

Predators discounted

Dr. Guthrie concluded: "There were definite signs of suspicious acts to the body of this cow-the nature in which the skin was severed and removed was not characteristic of a predator strike."

In addition to those cuts described by Dr. Guthrie, the neat circular patch of skin removed around the cow's eye, along with the eyeball, has been one of the hallmarks of animal mutilations since the 1970s. Rancher Ron Bartels told me, ". . . after several days, there had been no predation, and with the number of coyotes we now have in this area, they completely strip a carcass very quickly." But nothing touched the strangely cut cow. How are the cuts made: In my book An Alien Harvest, published in 1989, I show for the first time that tissue gathered from mutilator cuts in Arkansas on March 11, 1989, revealed the following characteristics under microscopic examination:

1) The line is pinpoint thin;

2) The line was subjected to high heat, probably 300 degrees Fahrenheit or above, leaving a hard and darkened edge;

3) The cuts were made rapidly, probably in two minutes or less, because there is no inflammatory cell destruction which typically begins in a few minutes after any trauma to tissue (See contrasting photomicrographs).

In addition to the 1989 mutilation reports in Idaho, Washington, Nebraska and Arkansas, there have been other cases in Colorado, Oklahoma, Missouri and Florida. Further, over 800 wild horses in Nevada have died mysteriously, about 70 domestic cats have been Found dead and bloodlessly mutilated in Tustin, California and 30 more cats in the East Bay of San Francisco. A city employee in Setauket, Long Island, NY, has reported to me that about a dozen raccoons, opossums, dogs and cats have been found in Percy Rayner bloodlessly mutilated with cuts similar to cows. I have also received calls about mutilations in Canada, but have no firm photographs or reports.

After An Alien Harvest was released in June of 1989, I received a letter from a security guard in Denver, Colorado. He described a night in August when he was patrolling the grounds of a large corporation west of the city. From his truck, he could see a large circle of lights in the dark sky. The lights remained stationary over a pasture a few hundred feet from the security guard. He was afraid to report the unidentified flying objects, because UFOs meant ridicule and he didn't want to lose his job. But he felt guilty about not reporting it, because the next morning he watched a farmer gather up a couple of dead and mutilated cows from the pasture where the lights had hovered overhead. He asked me, "What kind of technology are we talking about? I never took my eyes off those lights. There was no beam, no sound, nothing. How did they do it?"

That's a question which has haunted ranchers and law enforcement since the first worldwide reported mutilation of a horse in 1967. Not only how-but why? If alien life forms are intruding on this planet and harvesting from animals and humans, is a program of genetic experimentation and sustenance the answer? Or only part of a larger alien need? Will the 1990s finally bring humans face to face with an alien intelligence that has secretly used earth life for eons? As we become more conscious of its presence, will we learn that the alien intent is simply to survive without human help? Or is there some larger and more complex alien scheme which could challenge the future of human existence?