Distinctly Montana Magazine

D I S T I N C T L Y M O N T A N A M A G A Z I N E • F A L L 2 0 2 2 28 WEIRD HARVEST Cascade County Sheriff's Deputy Keith Wolverton was understandably perplexed by what he found when he was called to a ranch on September 22. He'd seen cattle mutilations be- fore, they'd been appearing more of- ten over the last few months and he had been tasked, in fact, with getting to the bottom of it. But this one was different. The udder and sex organs had been removed completely, not so odd in cases of cattle mutilation. But it was the way the body parts had been removed that struck Wolverton. In his book Mystery Stalks the Prairie, a classic of UFO lit- erature, Wolverton wrote that "the cut, obviously made with a very sharp instrument, had serrated edges similar to those created with pinking shears." Wolverton consulted a veter- inary pathologist in Colorado who observed the sample and confirmed that the marks "to the skin edge resembled neither tooth marks of a predator, nor those of wire lacerations." The next month, a cow near Belt was discovered with its left jaw skinned, and missing its tongue and right eye. The latter had presumably been removed, not through the eye socket, but through a hole in the skull above the eye. Most perplexingly, the cuts were accompanied by burns, as if made by a laser. Scavenging predators are to the cattle mutilation commu- nity what swamp gas and weather balloons are to the world of UFOs. And indeed, predation may explain the majority of livestock mutilations. But the absence of footprints at the site, humans or otherwise, puzzled Wolverton, and would seem to be a recurring feature of unexplained cattle mutilations. Many more mysterious mutilations followed. A bull calf was found sans testicles "as well as the cords leading to them." After removing some tissue for tests, the animal was left in the field where it died. After ten days, the rancher called and asked to have someone from the Sheriff's Depart- ment come back out to his place; it seems "the calf was found covered in a filmy white substance that stretched from the carcass to the surrounding ground like a cobweb." Samples of the stuff were taken and revealed to be "petroleum distillate." From late summer on, reports of mutilations came flooding in. During one feverish August night, the Sheriff's depart- ment of Teton County responded to three cattle mutilations on two different ranches. Many offered perplexing details that couldn't easily be explained by predation, such as the sex organs of a cow having been removed from an incision simi- lar to one a veterinarian might make to perform a C-section. Others exhibited minute puncture wounds, were apparently emptied of blood, or had limbs removed via cuts that sheared through bone but left no bone dust behind. In one case, the animal was found on top of Square Butte, which Meriwether Lewis had nicknamed "Fort Mountain" and described as "to all appearance inaccessible." Nevertheless, a calf was found missing a leg at the top of the butte. Witnesses reported see- ing an automobile approaching the butte five or so days ear- lier, but the ground around the animal was undisturbed. Finally, Wolverton and the Cascade County Sheriff's De- partment decided they needed help. They went to the Great Falls newspapers, radio and TV stations asking for any information the public might be able to provide. One tip led Wolverton to a convict housed in a "midwest federal penitentiary" who spun a wild tale about the mutilations being the work of a Texas cult who planned to graduate, as long as the law didn't catch them, to mutilating humans, including some prominent Montana politicians. Af- ter the convict failed several polygraph tests, his story proved a hoax. LOOK TO THE SKIES The absence of footprints in so many of the scenes led many speculate what sort of vehicle—or being—could reach the cattle without leading tracks, often in very soft or recent- ly tilled soil. Could they have come from above? And this is where things got really strange. From the beginning, two different flying machines were reported, each seeming to confirm separate theories about what was going on. The first was helicopters, suggesting the work of occultists, the government, or some other sinister but relatively mundane ex- planation. The second was UFOs, which connotes, well, alien beings or, at the very least, something un- earthly. In just just one week late in 1975, the Cascade Sheriff's Department received reports of one cattle mutilation, 16 UFO sightings, and 21 mysterious helicopters. At this stage, some truly dra- matic sightings were reported, such as "nine helicopters... reported flying together one night in the Hobson, Utica and Kolin area around Lewistown." Ultimately, UFO reports would be the most prevalent of the three phenomena, with a total of 127 reported.

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