The San Luis Valley is an unusual place. The 2010 census counted 47,000 residents in the valley—roughly 5.6 people for every square mile. It’s empty and expansive. Home to the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, the geographical landscape of the valley is so unique that it is difficult to describe with words. Prehistorically, the region was a massive lake. Its past aquatic history can be felt standing on the flat valley floor, encircled by 14,000 foot peaks that resemble a naturally-occurring cereal bowl. One of those peaks, Mt. Blanca, towers over the dune fields, menacing even from a car window.
The heart of the San Luis Valley is nestled between the San Juan and Sangre de Cristo mountain ranges. Visitors have described the area as “the Bermuda Triangle of the West” because of the disproportionate amount of UFO sightings that occur from the valley floor. In 2001, Judy Messoline, inspired by countless alien sighting accounts from her neighbors, opened the UFO Watchtower in a town named Hooper, population 105.
Just off a one-lane highway, the “tower” is humble and falling apart. A metal platform raised into the air by a less-than-responsible looking pole, the Watchtower stands in the middle of a barren field. It is the only building around for miles.
Alien enthusiasts and curious tourists are allowed to camp at the UFO Watchtower year-round for a small fee. According to a Huffington Post article from 2011, more than 20,000 people have visited the tower since its opening. Messoline has described more than 59 extraterrestrial sightings from her tower alone.
The UFO Watchtower’s website has a list of equipment recommended for alien investigations. The list includes everything from “military night vision equipment,” “biohazard suits,” and “jet packs” to “55 gallon drums of outdoor silver reflective paint.”
Messoline’s UFO Watchtower is representative of the wider cosmic obsession held by valley residents. The San Luis Valley is certified by the International Dark Sky Association, meaning it meets their light pollution limitation standards. Because of this, it is an unparalleled place for both star and UFO watching.
UFO sightings are not new to the San Luis Valley; they were recorded as early as the 1600s, long before any human-made object took to the skies. A major spike in extraterrestrial sightings happened in the 1960s during the height of the space race, when the cosmic world was at the forefront of many people’s minds.
Why is this small valley in rural Colorado home to so many alien sightings? As reported by Out There Colorado, some theorize the extraterrestrial hub could be a ploy to increase tourism. Others say the isolation of the valley, coupled with the sheer boredom of living there, conjures up the imaginative saucers that zoom across the dark night sky.
Author and self-described “open-minded skeptic” Richard Estep told The Colorado Sun the UFO Watchtower is “undeniably a tourist business, absolutely. [But] does that mean there’s no validity to what’s being seen?” Estep described his experience as a paranormal investigator, where he visited some locations that were plainly a cash grab, and others “that [were] worth every penny.”
“Just because somebody benefits financially doesn’t mean there’s not a genuine phenomenon at play,” Estep said.
Yet many valley locals seem to be justified in their extraterrestrial paranoia apart from tourist dollars, for a tragic and mind-boggling reason. The San Luis region is ground zero for an unexplained animal mutilation epidemic.
The first widely-publicized animal mutilation took place in Alamosa in 1967, an incident so mysterious it put the quiet valley on the world map.
A horse called Lady was found dead one September morning. Lady was not simply deceased: her head was stripped to the bone, flesh peeled back like a mask. Razor-like cuts covered the animal’s midsection, laser-esque in precision. A strong chemical scent similar to acetone filled the air.
The strangest part? Lady appeared to have been drained of blood, but there was not a drop in sight.
“Although the carcass had lain exposed for several days, it was not bloated and the smell was not that of decomposition. No predators, vultures or buzzards had found it appealing, though the flesh at the base of the neck was pliable,” wrote the Valley Courier of Alamosa.
There were no footprints indicative of human activity near the body. The horse's footprints ended about 100 feet from its remains.
The Valley Courier reported that the horse’s owner, Nellie Lewis, “found some gelatin-like green globs and a piece of metal covered with horsehair. After touching these, her hands began to burn and hurt until she could wash them.”
These materials were then tested by Duane Martin, a U.S. Forest Service employee, and were found to be radioactive.
Lewis reported the incident to then-sheriff Ben Phillips, who declared the horse had been killed by lightning and no further investigation was needed. Weather reports indicated there had been no lightning activity that day or on the days preceding Lady’s death.
What followed can be best described as nationwide animal mutilation epidemic. Hundreds of similar reports flooded in from across the country. Such reports are still being filed today—most recently from Oregon in February of this year. The mutilations have several common characteristics, notably the body’s complete lack of blood after death. There are reports of missing eyeballs, ears, genital extremities, and internal organs, and the same razor-like incisions more akin to scalpel cuts than marks from natural predators. There is almost always a lack of footprints or animal tracks around the deceased bodies.
Toxicology reports by the National Institute for Discovery Science, an organization that studies fringe science and paranormal topics, showed that some mutilated animals had unusually high or low levels of vitamins or minerals in their tissue. Yet it is nearly impossible to determine if such variations are related to the animal’s death or not because of the amount of time passed between death and autopsy.
One particularly curious case was Manuel Gomez’s mutilated bull in 1978. Found dead in Dulce, New Mexico, samples from the bull’s liver showed the organ contained no copper, but four times the normal amount of zinc, potassium, and phosphorus. The autopsy stated there was “no explanation for this condition … available at the present time.”
The mutilations were so horrific that even people outside the realm of paranormal subculture became concerned. In 1975, Colorado Democratic U.S. Sen. Floyd Haskell contacted the FBI to investigate the countless animal mutilations in his state. He said there had been 130 mutilations in Colorado alone and more reports across nine different states.
The FBI launched “Operation Animal Mutilation” in May of 1979. The investigation was led by agent Kenneth Rommel, who received a grant from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration.
Several correspondences between the FBI and Haskell are recorded in documents made available to the public under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). In one, dated September 1975, Haskell writes:
For several months my office has been receiving reports of cattle mutilations throughout Colorado and other western states. At least 130 cases in Colorado alone have been reported to local officials and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI); the CBI has verified that the incidents have occured for the last two years in nine states.
The ranchers and rural residents of Colorado are concerned and frightened by these incidents. The bizarre mutilations are frightening in themselves: in virtually all the cases, the left ear, left eye, rectum and sex organ of each animal has been cut away and the blood drained from the carcass, but with no traces of blood left on the ground and no footprints.
Rommel released his final report on the investigation in June of 1980, which disclosed that “according to some estimates, by 1979 10,000 cattle have been mysteriously mutilated.”
His findings?
The circumstances … are consistent with natural phenomena. According to Dr. Wilson [Chief of the Mammalogy Section of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service], when small mammals such as foxes and opposums feed on the carcasess of large mammals such as cattle that have not decayed, they first feed on soft tissues such as the nose, lips, udders and genital areas …
State veterinarians, after examination of mutilated animal carcasses, contend dead animals were eaten by other animals or varmints, believed to be foxes due to their sharp side teeth, which were described as “shearing teeth like scissors.”
This natural causes theory has been endorsed by several scientists and veterinary workers.
In a Canadian study published in 1989, scientists explained the following:
Missing or mutilated mouth, lips, anus and genitalia were attributed to contraction of tissue from dehydration, and small scavengers and parasites that burrow into the carcass where the skin is thinnest.
Missing or mutilated eyes and soft internal organs were eaten by insects such as blowflies, or birds of prey such as vultures, which are known to feed on these parts.
The animals appear to have been drained of blood because blood pools in the lowest parts of the body and then breaks down into its most basic organic components. The lack of external blood surrounding the body was attributed to solar desiccation and consumption by insects.
Surgical incisions in the skin are explained as tearing of the flesh when the body was stretched by post-death bloat, or dehydration that can cause an animal’s hide to split, often in linear cuts. They were also attributed to scavengers or predators such as foxes, though animal tracks were often not found near the bodies.
Case closed, right? Nope. Enraged ranchers refused to let it go, and argued that the mysterious circumstances surrounding the animal mutilations are too peculiar to be entirely explained by natural phenomena.
One theory is that cattle mutilations are the result of cult activity. Those in this camp believe mutilations are coordinated acts of ritual sacrifice. Theorists claim that blood draining, organ harvesting, and even the taking of unborn calves from their mothers may have been part of these rituals.
This idea was most popular during the 1970s and 1980s when fear of cults and satanic practices spiked nationwide: the murders committed by the infamous Manson family happened in 1969. The 1980s was also the height of the Satanic Panic, an era where false accusations of daycare centers practicing ritual satanic abuse became frequent and widespread.
Another theory is that animal mutilations are caused by government experiments. The government, these theorists argue, is researching emerging cattle diseases and their potential to be transmitted to humans. Perhaps researchers are even harvesting these cows to be used as weapons in biological warfare.
Yet the most widespread theory is that these mutilations are the work of aliens. Some ranchers in the San Luis Valley cite extraterrestrial life as the source of the deaths.
People have dedicated their lives to solving this mystery, like researcher Chuck Zukowski.
Zukowski is a Colorado Springs resident and the Deputy Director of Animal Mutilation Investigations for the Mutual UFO Network, a nonprofit that studies reported UFO sightings. He has over 35 years of experience researching paranormal activity, including cattle mutilations. He runs his own website, ufonut.com, where he details his investigations. Zukowski gives lectures at conventions on extraterrestrial life, and he is the subject of the Travel Channel’s TV show “Alien Highway.”
“I’ve had a few cases where the animal is lying in a round ground depression—not a crop circle—but a ground depression, where something pressed the vegetation down, 16 to 22 feet in diameter,” he explained to the Colorado Springs Independent. “I’ve taken soil samples from inside the ground depression and compared it to a test sample outside the ground depression, and the nutrients, the soil itself, in the ground depression is less water-soluble. The cations and [cation exchange capacity] are different.”
Zukowski believed whatever the deceased cow came into contact with had the ability to change the fundamental makeup of the soil. “I’ve also picked up an EMF [electromagnetic field] from these ground depressions,” he added.
He questioned the natural predator theory because of multiple reported observations stating that animals like coyotes wouldn’t get within 20 feet of the mutilated body.
A recent incident—a cow belonging to rancher Tom Miller was found mutilated in July of 2018—was detailed on Zukowski’s blog, describing a neighbor who reported a UFO sighting close to the night of the killing.
This cow was Miller’s 13th animal to die from mutilation in the past twenty years, which is not atypical, as the same ranchers are often hit again and again.
Zukowski wrote that one of Miller’s neighbors contacted him about a UFO sighting a few nights before the cow’s death. Around 11 p.m., “the witness watched reddish-orange lights in a circular pattern flashing on and off,” Zukowski’s notes read.
“These lights were going round and round like a Ferris wheel about the size of a bicycle tire,” the witness reported. “The lights were heading west which would be in the general location of the mutilation site. While watching the lights rotate and [move] away from the witnesses location, they suddenly disappeared, as if they were never there.”
Zukowski summed up his best evidence for extraterrestrial involvement in the mutilations:
Some animals are dropped or placed from great heights leaving internal skeletal compound fractures which cannot be explained unless the predator or scavenger is a “Fricken” T-Rex! Which leaves a scary unknown; who is doing this and why?
Some animals are laying in a round ground depression anywhere from 16 to 22 feet in diameter. When the soil is analyzed, the nutrients...[are] different compared to the test soil sample. The soil is less soluble near the animal [than] away from it. Also, [in] some mutilation cases unusual ground anomalies have been found nearby.
Some of the unusual cuts and surgical-like incisions on the animal are not similar to natural scavenger damage and way out in left field in some cases and just don’t make sense.
Zukowski asks: what if the perpetrator is not interested in animal parts at all, but only the blood? What if the unusual damage to the animal is a diversionary attempt to throw off the ranchers, veterinarians, and law enforcement?
Mike Duran, a rancher from Trinidad, Colo., first found one of his cows mutilated in 1996. “It was on its back with its legs up in the air and what I noticed was they had removed all the teats and the vaginal area and the cow’s horns, which are very, very hard to take off, those were maybe 20 or 30 feet from the cow,” he told Rooster Magazine.
Upon calling the authorities, the sheriff shrugged and said it must have been a predator. “I’m like, ‘yeah right,’” said Duran. “If it was a predator, it must have gone to Harvard Medical School.”
In 2009, Duran’s cattle were struck again. This time, he called in an alien investigator—by the name of Chuck Zukowski.
“The first thing you notice is that this animal is laying there and there’s absolutely no indication of movement. There’s no scuff marks,” said Zukowski. “When an animal dies, it normally kicks and fights for its last few breaths—but not these animals.”
Skeptics say no conclusive evidence has turned up in extraterrestrial investigations.
Alison Hudson’s episode on the podcast “Skeptoid” tackled cattle mutilation and its associated theories. “Alien mutilations as an explanation requires a whole host of other unsupported assumptions—that there are aliens, that they have interstellar travel ability, that they use that ability to visit Earth, and that they choose, when they come here, to routinely abduct and vivisect herd animals. None of these assumptions can be even remotely proven,” Hudson said.
She went on to cite Sheriff Herb Marshall of Washington County, Arkansas and his approach to cattle mutilation investigations in 1979.
The sheriff obtained a fresh cow corpse and put it in a field with similar conditions to the fields bodies had been found in. He then watched the corpse for the next 48 hours.
“The sheriff and his officers observed as a combination of bloating and blowflies went to work,” Hudson said. “Expanding gases split the stomach and exposed the internal organs; blowflies feasted on the organs and laid eggs in the soft-exposed tissues of eyes, lips, and anuses; and the resulting maggots devoured the soft tissues down to the bone.”
The ending result was a carcass that matched the common mutilation story—all from natural causes. “For Sheriff Marshall, that was case-closed on the mutilations in his area,” Hudson said.
Despite the lack of concrete evidence to pin the deaths on extraterrestrial life, humanity’s prolonged interest in UFOs and aliens is indicative of something greater.
“[Even] if there is no UFO phenomena, there is still a human phenomena at work, based on the fact that this many people believe they’re experiencing this many things,” Estep told The Colorado Sun.
UFOs have been spotted across the globe. Perhaps the San Luis Valley isn’t a special place, but simply a predictable instance of a larger event. “Seeing a UFO, and interpreting it as something extraordinary, seems a little bit like the doomed, lost kind of romantic love,” Denver author Sarah Scholes told The Gazette. “It comes along when you’re not looking for it. It amps up your ordinary experience, invigorates you every day … And it’s not the kind of thing you can ever really explain satisfactorily to anyone who wasn’t there.”
Scholes believes extraterrestrial life is fundamentally tied to the concept of faith. “It is a New Age religion,” she said of paranormal fascination. “It’s not a science, it’s not a hobby, it’s a faith system.”
Any faith system requires a leap from mere logic. At least, that’s what I was telling myself as I drove through the San Luis Valley late one night last November. Surrounding the dirt road were black silhouettes of jagged peaks contrasting an even darker sky. My car’s sunroof allowed dull silver starlight to flood in across my face and my backseat. Everything felt cosmic.
If you’re ever in the San Luis Valley, be mindful of how pronounced the stillness feels. The sound, the air. Keep watch of the sky. And don’t forget to call Chuck Zukowski if you happen to glimpse the cattle killing alien blood suckers, who exist in a world that is unexplainable, and somewhere far, far away.
Pandemics | October 2020