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Cattle Mutilations
In the fall of 1973, a suspicion grew among some
farmers and law-enforcement personnel in
Minnesota and Kansas that cattle were dying
under mysterious circumstances. The presumed
killers removed parts of the bodies, usually sex
organs, eyes, ears, tongues, and anuses (though
not necessarily all), leaving eerily bloodless
corpses. Those responsible also managed to
accomplish their grisly acts while leaving no
evidence of their presence in the form of foot- or
tire prints. The organs were removed with what
was judged, in a frequently used phrase, to be
“surgical precision.” In Lincoln County, in southwestern
Minnesota, the story spread that a cult of
devil-worshipers had conducted ritual sacrifices of
cows. The county sheriff concluded, however, that
the animals had died of natural causes, with the
damage—the “mutilation”—done by small predators
chewing on the softest tissue. When the
Kansas State University Veterinary Laboratory
made a similar determination upon autopsying
allegedly mutilated cattle, many farmers, ranches,
and rural police officers expressed skepticism and
insisted that something genuinely enigmatic, even
sinister, was occurring.
In short order the cattle mutilation epidemic
spread throughout the rural Midwest and West.
The pattern was set early: seemingly strange
deaths and body marks, followed by fears and
exotic theories, typically countered by veterinary
laboratories’ prosaic findings, and these generating
disbelief, rejection, and even suspicions of
cover-up. By the fall of 1974, concern about
elusive, uncatchable cattle mutilators had spread
Cattle Mutilations 39
Mutilated cattle carcass found in northern New Mexico
in the 1970s (Peter Jordan/Fortean Picture Library)
through the prairie and plains states, fueled by
rumor and speculation if not much solid
evidence. Popular paranoia focused on three
hypothetical culprits: a secret government agency
conducting secret psychological-warfare or biochemical
experiments; extraterrestrials working to
inscrutable alien ends; and Satanists performing
ritual sacrifices, possibly as a prelude to killings and
mutilations of human victims. Each theory had its
adherents and its own body of “evidence.”
The Satanist interpretation took an intriguing
turn in 1974, when Kansas state senator Ross
Doyen, who had spoken publicly about mutilations,
received a letter from an inmate at the
Leavenworth federal penitentiary. The prisoner, a
convicted bank robber named Albert Kenneth
Bankston, claimed to know of a violent, conspiratorial
group that was conducting cattle mutilations
along with other illegal activities, from drugdealing
to murder. Not long afterward Jerome
Clark, a Minnesota-based writer researching the
mutilation scare spoke with Doyen, who passed
on Bankston’s revelations. The writer entered into
correspondence with Bankston. Bankston stated
that, if he was transferred to a Minnesota jail
where his safety could be insured, he would tell the
whole story.
Around the same time—late 1974—J. Allen
Hynek, Northwestern University astronomer and
former UFO consultant to the U.S. Air Force’s
Project Blue Book, was curious about a possible
connection between UFOs and mutilations.
Seeking the services of a trained investigator, he
approached Donald E. Flickinger, an agent with
the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms division of the
U.S. Treasury Department. Flickinger, then