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 30 Helicopter sightings became so prevalent that, according to Wolverton, "Air Force Officials at Malmstrom... [had] two helicopters standing by with armed teams, ready to be launched if any helicopters were reported in the vicinity of missile sites." Many farmers and ranchers likewise armed themselves, leading to considerable anxiety that some errant National Guard helicopter might be mistaken for something more offensive and blown out of the sky by some overzealous and well-armed citizen. This was an anxiety shared by Sen- ator Floyd Haskell of Colorado, itself experiencing a string of mutilations, who wrote the FBI to warn them that some of his constituents were "arming themselves to protect their livestock, as well as their families and themselves, because they are frustrated... Clearly something must be done before someone gets hurt." But early on the 23rd of December, a woman driving to work at the Great Falls airport witnessed an "egg-shaped craft" that she described as being "as large as a two-story building." Less than a month later, a Fairfield rancher saw something "hotel-size" accompanied by three smaller lights in a field. The main object, he said, was "300 to 400 feet long and 60 feet in height, with two rows of windows, five to six feet high and two to three feet wide." Eventually that object and its friends disappeared over the Sun River Valley, but the rancher and his boy drove down the highway and came upon "a group of six small UFOs in a field" which they felt were different from the original ob- jects since the others had not been heading in this direction when they last saw them. Dozens more UFOs were report- ed, of varying size, luminosity, and high strangeness. As Wolverton wrote about each successive stage of the flap, "[t]here was overlapping, but one type of activity seemed to decline as another started." As December, and the year of 1975 went out, Bigfoot came in. The day after Christmas, two Great Falls girls heard their horses rearing up pawing at the ground. Going outside to investigate, they saw something "seven and a half feet tall and twice as wide as a man" with a "dark and awful looking" face that wasn't at all "like a human's." They shot at it, as any Montana kid would, with their .22 rifle to no discernible effect, although, as they hustled back into the house, they looked over their shoulders in time to see "several other creatures—she thought three or four—helping the first one back into the thicket." When they told one of the girls' fa- thers what they'd seen, he said that he had heard a noise "like a human dying an agonizing death" just after midnight that morning. Footprints would follow in April, although not the five-toed footprints most associate with Bigfoot, but bizarre three-toed footprints that defied taxological logic. On one occasion, a 16-year-old Helena boy wit- nessed two of the creatures, one very tall and the other shorter. The taller creature grabbed a dark object "about the size of a bale of hay" that seemed to have something "flapping from the ends of the object which looked similar to a piece of dark plastic." The boy, watching from the vantage of his bedroom, saw the taller creature turn his head and stare up at his bedroom window. The boy raced down- stairs to wake his father, but by the time they returned to the win- dow, only about two minutes or so, the creatures were gone. However, they found a large track on the property later that day, and once again, it appeared to have only three toes. Then, as mysteriously as it began, it stopped. Not abruptly, but with a trickle. Wolverton would later tell NIDS, the Na- tional Institute of Discovery Science, who would later study this flap of weird events, that though cattle mutilations would pop up here and there, they were no longer as frequent. The same goes for UFOs and Bigfoot; though there are relatively frequent sightings of them both in our state, they have rare- ly, if ever, reached the feverish intensity of that year or so of concentrated strangeness since. Sadly, Wolverton passed away in 2019 at the age of 81. While he contributed a great deal to the study of cattle muti- lations and never stopped advocating for getting to the bot- tom of the mystery, he never lived to see it solved. When he first volunteered to take on the cattle mutilation reports, Wolverton said, "I thought I could solve them in that time... but the time went by and I hadn't solved anything... So far, I have just been trying to get the facts together, but I haven't solved it yet, so I must be missing some information." Now, almost fifty years later, the case is still unsolved, al- though livestock mutilations continue across the world. France had its own puzzling series of apparent horse mutila- tions in 2020 (though eventually a suspect was found and ar- rested), the aforementioned 2021 wave of Oregon mutilations discomfited many ranchers, and Utah's infamous "Skinwalk- er" ranch has seen its share as well. The farmers and ranchers who have found their livelihood exsanguinated and mutilated in their own fields deserve an answer. Sadly, since a level-headed law enforcement officer like Keith Wolverton can spend most of his life looking for an- swers and finding only more questions, it just might be that the answers aren't coming any time soon. So until then, keep your eyes on the sky, and from hood- ed cultists, aliens, Bigfoot, government stormtroopers, black helicopters, and any other ghosts, ghoulies, or long-legged beasties, Good Lord, deliver us!

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