UDSKRIFT 🔗
WEBVTT
1
00:00:04.960 --> 00:00:10.070
This is Connective Tissue. I'm Darren Marlar. In 1967, a
2
00:00:10.109 --> 00:00:13.490
horse named Lady was found on her side near Alamosa, Colorado,
3
00:00:13.849 --> 00:00:16.589
with the flesh stripped from her head and neck and
4
00:00:16.670 --> 00:00:20.670
no blood on the ground. In Montana, ranchers kept finding
5
00:00:20.730 --> 00:00:24.030
cattle dead with their organs missing and no tracks leading
6
00:00:24.250 --> 00:00:27.480
in or out. On a ranch in Utah, a wolf
7
00:00:27.739 --> 00:00:31.739
took six shots and walked off into the trees. In
8
00:00:31.780 --> 00:00:35.210
this series, I'm taking you through my book, Connective Tissue,
9
00:00:35.609 --> 00:00:39.250
one chapter at a time, following the dead cattle to Bigfoot,
10
00:00:39.649 --> 00:00:43.750
alien abductions, mind control, and the men in black. The
11
00:00:43.789 --> 00:00:48.750
cases come from government records, police and court files, published accounts,
12
00:00:49.170 --> 00:00:52.070
and the people who were there. A word of warning
13
00:00:52.149 --> 00:00:56.899
before I begin. Several chapters do describe real violence against animals,
14
00:00:57.259 --> 00:01:03.460
household pets included, and against people. And now, Connective Tissue,
15
00:01:04.079 --> 00:01:09.450
How Cattle Mutilations Link Bigfoot, Alien Abductions, Mind Control, and
16
00:01:09.670 --> 00:01:16.969
The Men in Black. You know that cattle mutilation is
17
00:01:17.010 --> 00:01:19.310
going to be a large focus in this book, and
18
00:01:19.349 --> 00:01:22.409
I can only assume that doesn't bother you because you
19
00:01:22.469 --> 00:01:24.950
saw it right there on the cover and decided to
20
00:01:24.989 --> 00:01:28.609
begin reading anyway. But I also know the human heart,
21
00:01:29.189 --> 00:01:33.319
and some people who love dogs... hate cats, and some
22
00:01:33.340 --> 00:01:37.060
people who couldn't care less about cows find horses to
23
00:01:37.099 --> 00:01:40.420
be majestic and would struggle to learn of one's suffering.
24
00:01:41.340 --> 00:01:44.579
If that's you, this is going to be a tough chapter.
25
00:01:46.079 --> 00:01:50.719
In September 1967, sources differ on the exact date, a
26
00:01:50.780 --> 00:01:54.340
three-year-old Appaloosa horse failed to come in for her evening
27
00:01:54.420 --> 00:01:58.250
feeding on the King family ranch near Alamosa, Colorado. She
28
00:01:58.290 --> 00:02:01.230
belonged to Nellie Lewis, who boarded her with her mother,
29
00:02:01.510 --> 00:02:04.849
Agnes King, and brother, Harry King. When the horse didn't
30
00:02:04.909 --> 00:02:08.060
appear at the fence line for her usual treats, Harry
31
00:02:08.069 --> 00:02:11.439
and Agnes went looking for her. They found her on
32
00:02:11.479 --> 00:02:14.340
her side. The flesh of her head and neck had
33
00:02:14.379 --> 00:02:17.219
been stripped cleanly down to the bone. The cuts on
34
00:02:17.259 --> 00:02:20.039
her body were precise enough that neither of them believed
35
00:02:20.099 --> 00:02:23.560
a predator had made them. there was no blood anywhere
36
00:02:23.780 --> 00:02:26.659
on her or on the ground around her, despite wounds
37
00:02:26.979 --> 00:02:29.800
that should have produced a great deal of it. The
38
00:02:29.840 --> 00:02:33.939
horse showed no bloating and no sign of decomposition, even
39
00:02:33.979 --> 00:02:36.419
though she appeared to have been dead for several days,
40
00:02:36.740 --> 00:02:40.599
and no scavengers had touched the carcass. Her own tracks
41
00:02:40.750 --> 00:02:44.590
stopped abruptly, about a hundred feet from where her body lay,
42
00:02:44.969 --> 00:02:49.650
with no explanation for how she'd covered the remaining distance. Nearby,
43
00:02:49.689 --> 00:02:52.530
the ground bore burn marks, Some of them arranged in
44
00:02:52.569 --> 00:02:56.490
a distinct, circular pattern. And despite the belief that what
45
00:02:56.509 --> 00:02:59.610
had happened to Lady took place several days earlier, a
46
00:03:00.270 --> 00:03:04.129
strong chemical smell still hung in the air around the site.
47
00:03:05.389 --> 00:03:08.830
Agnes King would later say she'd seen an unidentified object
48
00:03:08.930 --> 00:03:11.569
pass over the house in the days before the discovery.
49
00:03:13.069 --> 00:03:18.000
The horse's name was Lady. Early press coverage confused her
50
00:03:18.039 --> 00:03:21.659
with her sire, a horse named Snippy, and the mistaken
51
00:03:21.710 --> 00:03:28.050
name stuck through decades of retelling. The Aerial Phenomenon Research Organization,
52
00:03:28.509 --> 00:03:31.770
one of the most active UFO investigative groups operating at
53
00:03:31.789 --> 00:03:35.789
the time, sent investigators to the scene. Among those who
54
00:03:35.830 --> 00:03:40.229
examined Lady's remains was Dr. John Altshuler, a pathologist with
55
00:03:40.270 --> 00:03:45.129
a specific expertise in blood coagulation. He found that her heart, lungs,
56
00:03:45.210 --> 00:03:48.479
and thyroid had been removed. along with portions of her
57
00:03:48.539 --> 00:03:52.479
brain and abdominal organs, all with cuts he described as
58
00:03:52.539 --> 00:03:56.370
among the cleanest he had ever encountered. What struck him
59
00:03:56.469 --> 00:04:00.849
most was the absence of blood. Years later, describing the
60
00:04:00.889 --> 00:04:04.430
scene to a reporter, Altshuler said, I have done hundreds
61
00:04:04.469 --> 00:04:07.810
of autopsies. You can't cut into a body without getting
62
00:04:07.870 --> 00:04:10.979
some blood. But there was no blood on the skin
63
00:04:11.199 --> 00:04:16.860
or the ground. The record shows two official examinations of
64
00:04:16.920 --> 00:04:22.459
Lady's remains, and each reached a different conclusion. The Condon Committee,
65
00:04:22.660 --> 00:04:25.720
a University of Colorado research group funded by the U.S.
66
00:04:25.800 --> 00:04:30.189
Load full transcript
Air Force to study UFO reports, sent its own pathologist, Dr.
67
00:04:30.269 --> 00:04:34.189
Robert Adams, to examine the case. Adams concluded that Lady
68
00:04:34.230 --> 00:04:36.569
had been suffering from a leg infection at the time
69
00:04:36.610 --> 00:04:40.000
of her death and that someone, presumably to end her suffering,
70
00:04:40.300 --> 00:04:43.610
had slit her throat. he attributed the missing organs and
71
00:04:43.670 --> 00:04:47.649
tissues to the ordinary work of bacteria, birds, and coyotes
72
00:04:47.730 --> 00:04:52.129
over the following days. The committee's final report stated there was, quote,
73
00:04:52.500 --> 00:04:55.339
no evidence to support the assertion that the horse's death
74
00:04:55.379 --> 00:05:00.240
was associated in any way to abnormal causes, unquote. Locally,
75
00:05:00.620 --> 00:05:04.720
Alamosa County Sheriff Ben Phillips offered a different, mundane theory
76
00:05:04.800 --> 00:05:08.199
without ever visiting the site himself, suggesting Lady had been
77
00:05:08.259 --> 00:05:14.910
struck by lightning. Yes, lightning. that targeted only the heart, lungs, thyroid,
78
00:05:14.949 --> 00:05:19.310
specific portions of the brain, and certain abdominal organs. That's
79
00:05:19.370 --> 00:05:23.589
a very finicky bolt of lightning there, Sheriff. Neither explanation
80
00:05:23.629 --> 00:05:26.910
accounted for the absence of blood that Altshuler described, for
81
00:05:26.949 --> 00:05:29.170
the surgical appearance of the cuts that had been made,
82
00:05:29.670 --> 00:05:31.829
or for the tracks that stopped a hundred feet short
83
00:05:31.870 --> 00:05:35.480
of the body. Maybe all of that was magic lightning, too.
84
00:05:37.139 --> 00:05:40.050
You might be wondering, as I did, if any of
85
00:05:40.089 --> 00:05:43.279
those missing body parts from Lady have anything to do
86
00:05:43.339 --> 00:05:46.500
with each other, aside from being body parts of a horse.
87
00:05:47.480 --> 00:05:52.560
Why would those specific pieces, the heart, lungs, thyroid, a
88
00:05:52.600 --> 00:05:55.879
portion of the brain, and abdominal organs, have been taken
89
00:05:56.050 --> 00:05:59.790
while the rest of the organs were left behind? Not surprisingly,
90
00:05:59.949 --> 00:06:02.009
you and I are not the only ones to wonder
91
00:06:02.069 --> 00:06:06.550
about that. Beyond simply being soft tissue, they share something
92
00:06:06.610 --> 00:06:09.899
more specific. The heart and lungs sit at the center
93
00:06:09.920 --> 00:06:13.579
of the circulatory and respiratory systems. The thyroid is a
94
00:06:13.660 --> 00:06:19.949
major hormone-producing gland. The brain and abdominal organs handle neural function, filtration,
95
00:06:20.149 --> 00:06:26.069
and metabolism. Together, they represent some of the most vascular, hormone-rich,
96
00:06:26.170 --> 00:06:31.100
and biologically active tissue in the body. Christopher O'Brien, the
97
00:06:31.139 --> 00:06:34.120
San Luis Valley researcher whose work appears throughout this book,
98
00:06:34.540 --> 00:06:37.160
has pointed to that same detail in support of what
99
00:06:37.199 --> 00:06:41.819
he calls an environmental monitoring theory, that whoever or whatever
100
00:06:41.939 --> 00:06:45.759
is responsible may be sampling the tissue most useful for
101
00:06:45.850 --> 00:06:50.930
tracking contamination, radiation, or biological agents moving through a herd,
102
00:06:51.329 --> 00:06:55.970
rather than targeting these organs at random. Despite the fact
103
00:06:56.069 --> 00:06:59.470
that she is a horse, Lady's death is usually credited
104
00:06:59.589 --> 00:07:02.889
as the case that introduced cattle mutilation to the wider public.
105
00:07:03.750 --> 00:07:07.170
but the pattern itself goes back much further than 1967.
106
00:07:07.170 --> 00:07:12.490
The earliest documented outbreak on record comes from early 1606
107
00:07:12.490 --> 00:07:16.970
in the official court records of James I of England,
108
00:07:17.370 --> 00:07:21.350
describing whole slaughters of sheep around London and the surrounding
109
00:07:21.430 --> 00:07:24.629
shires in which nothing was taken from the animals but
110
00:07:24.670 --> 00:07:28.490
their tallow and certain internal organs, the carcasses and fleece
111
00:07:28.629 --> 00:07:33.600
left otherwise untouched. Writer Charles Forte who spent much of
112
00:07:33.639 --> 00:07:38.339
his life cataloguing reports that mainstream science ignored, documented further
113
00:07:38.399 --> 00:07:43.129
outbreaks in his 1931 book, Low. During the winter of
114
00:07:43.129 --> 00:07:47.949
1904 and 1905, amid a wave of religious revivalism in Wales,
115
00:07:48.430 --> 00:07:51.829
witnesses reported strange lights in the sky alongside a series
116
00:07:51.870 --> 00:07:56.569
of attacks on sheep. In 1910, something killed sheep across
117
00:07:56.589 --> 00:08:00.649
the same region on a large scale, several animals a night.
118
00:08:01.160 --> 00:08:06.399
while rabbits were found nearby with their backs broken. In 2013,
119
00:08:06.399 --> 00:08:10.269
a wave of sheep mutilations swept through Calhoun County, Texas,
120
00:08:10.569 --> 00:08:13.670
near the town of Port Lavaca, one farmer alone losing
121
00:08:13.670 --> 00:08:18.910
21 animals, males castrated and females stripped of their reproductive organs.
122
00:08:19.769 --> 00:08:23.480
The sheriff investigating the wave, George Ailman, told reporters he
123
00:08:23.540 --> 00:08:27.920
remembered a nearly identical pattern from decades earlier. a self-proclaimed
124
00:08:28.079 --> 00:08:32.000
Satanic group blamed for several cattle mutilations in that same
125
00:08:32.080 --> 00:08:35.750
county during the late 1970s. While he didn't believe the
126
00:08:35.799 --> 00:08:39.370
same group was responsible the second time around, whatever was
127
00:08:39.450 --> 00:08:43.309
behind the original wave had a remarkably similar pattern to
128
00:08:43.350 --> 00:08:46.309
what had appeared again in the same stretch of Texas
129
00:08:46.309 --> 00:08:50.029
35 years later. It wouldn't be the last time the
130
00:08:50.070 --> 00:08:53.049
word Satan got attached to a pile of dead animals
131
00:08:53.129 --> 00:08:56.350
in these pages. a pattern this book returns to directly
132
00:08:56.549 --> 00:09:01.440
in the chapter on the Satanic Panic. Reports of similarly
133
00:09:01.519 --> 00:09:06.379
mutilated cattle and other livestock began climbing through the early 1970s,
134
00:09:06.879 --> 00:09:12.360
and kept climbing. Between April and October of 1975 alone,
135
00:09:12.860 --> 00:09:17.590
Colorado authorities logged close to 200 reported cattle mutilations, and
136
00:09:17.610 --> 00:09:21.210
the Colorado Associated Press named it the state's top story
137
00:09:21.230 --> 00:09:24.620
of the year, which is no small claim. seeing as
138
00:09:24.620 --> 00:09:28.419
1975 also saw the inauguration of a new governor who
139
00:09:28.450 --> 00:09:32.190
had defeated the incumbent, a plane with 131 people aboard
140
00:09:32.450 --> 00:09:36.230
crashed during takeoff at Denver's Stapleton Airport, the Red Dirt
141
00:09:36.289 --> 00:09:39.669
Fire chewed through nearly 4,400 acres of the White River
142
00:09:39.710 --> 00:09:43.259
National Forest in what was called the largest firefighter effort
143
00:09:43.340 --> 00:09:46.600
in state history, and John Denver named the Country Music
144
00:09:46.620 --> 00:09:50.840
Association's Entertainer of the Year. The cow mutilations beat them
145
00:09:51.100 --> 00:09:56.139
all for coverage. Colorado Senator Floyd Haskell pressed the FBI
146
00:09:56.179 --> 00:10:01.110
for federal assistance, citing more than 130 confirmed cases in
147
00:10:01.149 --> 00:10:07.090
his state. Nationwide, more than 1,500 alleged mutilations were reported
148
00:10:07.149 --> 00:10:12.580
across 22 states between 1973 and 1976, and by the
149
00:10:12.620 --> 00:10:15.960
end of the decade, researchers tracking the phenomenon put the
150
00:10:16.049 --> 00:10:21.730
cumulative total above 10,000 incidents. the FBI's involvement when it
151
00:10:21.769 --> 00:10:24.649
finally came was less than many locals had hoped for.
152
00:10:25.529 --> 00:10:29.110
Bureau jurisdiction over cattle mutilations was limited to cases occurring
153
00:10:29.429 --> 00:10:32.919
on Indian reservations, and for most of the 1970s, that
154
00:10:32.960 --> 00:10:35.940
left the vast majority of reports to local sheriffs and
155
00:10:36.019 --> 00:10:39.779
county veterinarians with neither the funding nor the forensic tools
156
00:10:39.820 --> 00:10:45.139
to investigate them properly. In December 1978, New Mexico Senator
157
00:10:45.259 --> 00:10:48.779
Harrison Schmitt a former astronaut with a doctorate in geology,
158
00:10:49.100 --> 00:10:52.470
wrote to Attorney General Griffin Bell asking the Justice Department
159
00:10:52.750 --> 00:10:58.490
to
re-examine its jurisdiction and reopen the question. On April 20, 1979,
160
00:10:58.490 --> 00:11:03.429
Schmidt chaired a conference on animal mutilations in Albuquerque attended
161
00:11:03.470 --> 00:11:07.980
by roughly 180 people. The FBI opened its investigation into
162
00:11:08.009 --> 00:11:12.620
mutilations on New Mexico's Indian lands that same year. The
163
00:11:12.659 --> 00:11:16.649
investigation was carried out by Kenneth Rommel, a retired FBI
164
00:11:16.710 --> 00:11:20.870
agent operating under a grant of just over $ 44, 000 from
165
00:11:20.909 --> 00:11:24.870
the Justice Department's Law Enforcement Assistance Administration and working through
166
00:11:24.889 --> 00:11:28.970
the first judicial district attorney's office in New Mexico. Rommel
167
00:11:29.090 --> 00:11:34.809
ultimately examined 90 reported mutilation cases. In June 1980, he
168
00:11:34.850 --> 00:11:39.519
submitted a 297-page report. At a press conference that April,
169
00:11:39.860 --> 00:11:44.610
ahead of the report's formal submission, he'd already announced his conclusions. quote,
170
00:11:45.309 --> 00:11:48.409
after laboriously weighing and analyzing the evidence, I have come
171
00:11:48.450 --> 00:11:51.090
to the conclusion that the vast majority of mutilations are
172
00:11:51.129 --> 00:11:57.580
caused by predators and scavengers, unquote. Rommel's report closed the
173
00:11:57.679 --> 00:12:01.159
FBI's formal involvement in the mutilation question. It did not
174
00:12:01.240 --> 00:12:04.620
close the case files being opened on ranches across the country,
175
00:12:05.139 --> 00:12:09.330
which by 1980 numbered in the thousands and showed no
176
00:12:09.450 --> 00:12:14.470
sign of slowing down. Rommel's report remains the closest thing
177
00:12:14.509 --> 00:12:18.470
this phenomenon has to an official verdict. It didn't stop
178
00:12:18.549 --> 00:12:21.490
a single rancher from finding another mutilated animal in the
179
00:12:21.529 --> 00:12:24.820
years that followed. Nor did it explain why predators and
180
00:12:24.860 --> 00:12:28.879
scavengers would be traveling with scalpels to cut steak. The
181
00:12:28.899 --> 00:12:33.480
chapters ahead will follow this same unresolved signature into Bigfoot country,
182
00:12:33.919 --> 00:12:40.220
into UFO abduction reports, into a declassified Cold War mind-control program. Yes, really.
183
00:12:40.779 --> 00:12:43.740
and into a moral panic that swept the country a
184
00:12:43.840 --> 00:12:47.909
decade and a half after Lady's death. Even stranger than
185
00:12:47.950 --> 00:12:52.429
cattle mutilation itself is what you discover it has connections to.
186
00:12:55.090 --> 00:12:58.909
Thanks for listening. I've been reading from my book, Connective Tissue,
187
00:12:59.330 --> 00:13:04.080
How Cattle Mutilations Link Bigfoot, Alien Abductions, Mind Control, and
188
00:13:04.100 --> 00:13:07.129
the Men in Black. The book is currently on pre-sale,
189
00:13:07.309 --> 00:13:11.120
releasing Friday, November 13th on Amazon for Kindle and paperback,
190
00:13:11.360 --> 00:13:14.659
and the Kindle edition is included with Kindle Plus. You
191
00:13:14.679 --> 00:13:19.240
can pre-order the Kindle edition right now on that same page, weirddarkness.com
192
00:13:19.299 --> 00:13:25.580
slash connectivetissue. That's weirddarkness.com slash connectivetissue. Or find all of
193
00:13:25.600 --> 00:13:29.840
my books, fiction and non-fiction, at weirddarkness.com slash books.