Cattle Mutilations Across Wyoming And The West In 1970s Still A Mystery

The horror of mutilated cattle, cheeks cut off on one side, tongues missing, sexual organs removed, bloodless carcasses and no visible signs of predation made big, bold headlines across Wyoming and the West in mid-1970s.

Wyoming had reports of cattle mutilated in Newcastle in the Bridger Valley in Uinta County and in Sublette County. There were mutilated horses in Meeteetse and Carbon County. Two years later there was a report of a heifer outside Casper found dead under similar circumstances.

In the years immediately after the Vietnam War and Watergate, suspects included the U.S. military, who some surmised were conducting experiments or collecting tissue, satanic cults or UFO visitations.

Efforts by a Nebraska senator to get the FBI involved were met with hesitation and reluctance from the agency, which only fueled speculation. The mystery has lingered for decades, still spooking ranchers and former law enforcement officers as Halloween approaches, reminding them of a real horror they lived through.

“It lasted in our area three years,” former Uinta County Sheriff Leonard Hysell told Cowboy State Daily in an interview. “The first year we had it was an ungodly amount of them, a lot.”

While the headlines died off in the 1980s, reports of periodic cattle mutilations have continued. In Texas six cows were mutilated in similar fashion in 2023. Mutilations that occurred in eastern Oregon communities in recent years were profiled on Netflix’s latest season of “Unsolved Mysteries.”

Current Wyoming Livestock Growers Association Executive Vice President Jim Magagna and Wyoming State Veterinarian Dr. Hollie Hasel said they know of no reports of incidents of mutilation in the state since they assumed their respective roles.

The Mutilations Begin

But in the 1970s, the losses were real and the ranchers and law enforcement were at a loss to find a culprit or motive for the grotesque mutilations in the Cowboy State and rest of the country.

The Casper Star-Tribune reported on Oct. 26, 1975, that suspected cattle mutilations surpassed 45 cows with 10 in Sublette County and 16 in Uinta County. On Sept. 30, the paper reported on a calf north of Gillette with its sexual organs cut off and the stomach cut with a sharp instrument.

The Campbell County Sheriff’s Office characterized the death as a “confirmed mutilation” after a veterinarian could not determine the cause of death and there were no signs or tracks of predators or humans.

For Hysell, then Uinta County undersheriff, the incidents represented the most bizarre cases he investigated in his 47-year law enforcement career, including 20 years in Uinta County.

“We only took the ones that were fresh kills, anything that was over 24 hours old we didn’t try to speculate on that,” he said. “Fresh kills we really tried to investigate. We racked up a large number of them. One rancher alone had 16 head, six in one night in one pasture. Now the predators are not doing that.”

Evidence Of Helicopters

While many news stories speak of the lack of evidence and tracks around the kills, Hysell said he did find certain evidence at some of the sites that led to his suspicions about the cause — and it involved helicopters.

During the period when cattle were being discovered mutilated, there were credible reports of military-style helicopters in the area and, on one occasion, three in different locations. Hysell said the aircraft had no numbers on the side, did not use lights and were only seen at dusk.

“We found a lot of rotor wash around the carcasses, we found the marks of the landing skids,” he said. “That led me to believe it was something a little more involved. And predators wouldn’t have anything to do with those carcasses. Birds wouldn’t peck on them. We never had any incidents like that before and we never had any after. If it was predators, why didn’t it continue on? It just didn’t.”

On Sept. 3, 1975, the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph reported that El Paso County Undersheriff Gary Gibbs pointed to a satanic cult.

“They are nomadic people. In the past two years we’ve found evidence of similar happenings in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and Wyoming. This isn’t a small group. There are several thousand members across the country,” he was quoted. “Some people laugh at the idea, but we have been working very hard on the problem and we have definite evidence. We want to catch these people because we don’t know what they’ll do when they tire of mutilating cows.”

Hysell said the cult theory was not something he agreed with because of the money it took to operate the helicopters he knows were flying in and around his county at the time. But he does know that the federal government and state agencies were extremely reluctant to help sheriff departments across the West. And that included in Wyoming.

“The state crime labs wouldn’t have anything to do with anything either in Wyoming or in Utah,” he said. “I heard from other sheriff offices that that was the case they were running up against in all of their states.”

FBI File

An FBI file on the cattle mutilations reveals letters that were sent by Nebraska Sen. Carl Curtis to FBI Director Clarence M. Kelly in 1974 seeking the federal agency’s help with solving the crimes.

“This will refer to my previous letter of August 21 to you regarding the series of incidents stretching from Oklahoma to Nebraska in which cattle have been dismembered in some kind of strange witchcraft cult,” Curtis wrote. “I am wondering if your good offices have instigated an investigation of this situation either in Nebraska or any of the other states experiencing similar acts of mutilation to livestock.”

The FBI director replied on Sept. 10, 1974, that he had an agent check into the matter and it appeared “no federal law within the jurisdiction of the FBI has been violated.”

By 1979, Sen. Harrison Schmitt of New Mexico succeeded in getting the Senate Appropriations Committee to include language in its report directing the FBI to “maintain its investigation of the cattle mutilations that have occurred in New Mexico and elsewhere.”

Retired FBI agent Kenneth Rommel led an investigation into cattle mutilated on a native reservation in New Mexico and concluded that it was predators that were to blame.

“Most credible sources have attributed this damage to normal predator and scavenger activity. However certain segments of the population have attributed the damage to other causes ranging from UFOs to a giant government conspiracy,” Rommel wrote in a letter to the FBI on March 5, 1980. “No factual data has been supplied supporting these theories.”

Rommel did send in flakes of material that appeared on top of a Taos, N.M.. pickup truck in July 1978 after a UFO allegedly hovered over it. The FBI lab concluded it was white enamel paint, typical of exterior house paint and that the particles “appear to have originated from a wood substrate.”

Predator Conclusion ‘Not Valid’

Hysell said he did not accept the FBI’s conclusion about predators.

“I never met too many FBI agents that knew much about predators, at least the four-legged kind,” he said. “I totally thought that conclusion was not valid.”

Hysell said he suspected that the government was involved in the mutilations possibly due to a chemical or biological mishap and it needed to test to see how extensive the material had spread.

“There were mutilations of any place where air, water or food could enter or exit the bodies,” he said.

An article in the Casper Star-Tribune on Oct. 23, 1977, quoted a spokesman for the national Cattlemen’s Association who estimated 3,000 mutilations had been reported across 22 states beginning in late 1974 through a peak in the summers of 1975 and 1976.

One facility in Utah known to be involved in chemical and biological weapons is the Dugway Proving Ground located 85 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah.

A congressional report by the Committee on Veteran’s Affairs and Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV on Dec. 8, 1994, stated that the proving ground had been the site of testing for various chemical and biological agents.

In 1968, the report stated that 6,400 sheep near the facility died following “the intentional release of a deadly nerve gas from a plane.”

“Initially the Defense Department denied any responsibility for the accident … However, the nerve agent VX was identified when the poisoned sheep were autopsied, which made it clear the deaths were not caused by pesticides,” the report stated. “Eventually, the Defense Department reimbursed the ranchers for their animals.”

‘Simulant Testing’

After the 1968 deaths, the report stated the Department of Defense developed “simulant” testing. But during “45-years” of open-air testing, “the Army has stopped using a variety of simulants when they realized they were not as safe as believed,” the report stated.

While the mass mutilations of the mid-70s have stopped, reports of similar mutilations still occur. One of the most recent reports involved six cattle mutilations in Texas.

A press release on May 23, 2023, by the Animal Legal Defense Fund reported that a 6-year-old longhorn-cross cow was discovered in April 2023 in Madison County with its tongue removed by a “straight, clean cut with apparent precision along the jawline. Scavenging animals did not touch the body.

Five additional cows were discovered with their anus and sexual organs removed in addition to the tongues in neighboring Brazos and Robertson counties.

The investigator into the Madison County incident told Cowboy State Daily she could not speak to the media without the sheriff’s approval. A message left with the sheriff was not responded to by deadline.

As Hysell looks back on the mid-70s and the collaboration with sheriff departments across the West, he recalls that a lot of people were “ridiculed” as they tried to find the answers.

“I felt like we were being controlled with the news of it,” he said. “I will tell you this at least in one case, I won’t tell you which state it was in, a person who worked in the crime lab, they were told to back off of it, that they would not accept any more samples and they were to shut up about it.”

Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.