Las Vegas NowI-Team: The Killing Fields, Part 1
The animal mutilation mystery has been around for a long time, but after more than 10,000 cases reported in nearly every state, answers are still hard to come by. Nevada ranchers have been victimized by the mystery surgeons for more than 30 years, although the majority of cases are never reported at all.
We may not hear about mutilation cases very often, but they happen all the time. The latest incident was reported in Saskatchewan two days ago. We've had them all over Nevada, although, for the most part, ranchers would rather bury the evidence than make a report to anyone.
Despite our fondness for UFO's and unsolved mysteries, there could be a down to earth explanation for at least some of the cases, although it's not very pleasant.
"The more I started to look at it, I could tell it was something far more outrageous," said Las Vegas rancher Bonnie Martin.
Martin isn't a UFO nut or conspiracy buff, but when she discovered a carved up steer carcass in her yard back in 1994, she had to think long and hard.
In the dead of night, someone -- or something -- crept onto the Martin's property, just yards from where the family was sleeping, and removed the sex organs and other parts from a 700 pound steer without alerting anyone in the quiet northwest valley neighborhood.
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Garth Lamb had never seen anything like it in his 23 years as a veterinarian. He says the mystery surgeon used special tools.
"It appears to be something very sharp. I mean, if I was going to remove a cancerous growth or something, I'd use a scalpel like this," he said.
Lamb kept the skull from the Martin mutilation and found someone had cut a piece of thick bone from behind the ear, but doesn't know how.
"The things they remove and the way it's done, it's not just a random slashing type mutilation. There is something, some reason behind this. What it is, I don't know," he said.
The same questions have stumped thousands of ranchers and lawmen in every part of the U.S. The so-called mutilations have been ongoing since the 60's. The telltale signs are now part of modern mythology -- no tracks, no blood left in or around the animal, no cause of death, the same parts taken from cattle, horses, deer, and other animals.
The steer that was mutilated on the Martin ranch was obtained weeks before from a ranch in Lincoln County, an area which has experienced mutilations since the 70s, probably longer. The Buckhorn Ranch, once owned by late Senator Floyd Lamb, was victimized twice.
"Take a bull, cut him up, dissect him. I don't understand that -- some kook," he said back in February of 2000.
The same kind of kook has been operating in Lander County, where one particular ranch has been visited by the mystery mutilators seven times in this decade alone. Sheriff's investigators say predators aren't to blame, and neither are devil worshippers, but what about the government?
"I've heard that theory, but why leave the carcasses where they can be found?" said Lander County Deputy Sgt. Klaus Altemueller.
"We are talking about tens, literally tens of thousands of cases. No one has ever been arrested. No one has ever been prosecuted. No one has ever been caught," said Ted Oliphant.
Oliphant is a filmmaker living in Las Vegas, but in the early 90's he was an Alabama police officer caught in the middle of a mutilation epidemic.
Dozens of animals were sliced up in the night. Ranchers suspected a connection to weird lights in the sky -- but along with the UFO's, there were helicopters, a lot of them, as if someone was monitoring the mutilators.
"In some cases, it almost seems like we've been in a race to see who can get to the animal's carcass first," said Oliphant.
"We don't have any hard evidence of who was actually doing the monitoring, but we have a lot of evidence to say that the monitoring was going on," said Dr. Colm Kelleher.
Biochemist Dr. Colm Kelleher spent several years studying the mutilation mystery for NIDS, the National Institute of Discovery Science, founded by Las Vegas businessman Robert Bigelow. The NIDS team investigated dozens of cases in western states and began to suspect there may be two different groups at work: an unknown force that's been dissecting animals for a long time and a very human agency that has been mimicking the first group, perhaps as a way to track the progress of something as it moves through the food chain.
The sheer weirdness factor would make it unlikely that anyone would investigate.
"That's a way of hiding things in plain sight. You've built up a tabloid industry regarding the whole cattle mutilation thing, but it's instantly disparaged as absolute B.S. No serious scientist will take it seriously," said Kelleher.
In a handful of cases, physical evidence has been obtained that makes it clear some sneaky humans are carrying this out, as opposed to beef-loving ET's.
Friday night at 11, we'll tell you about that evidence, plus the big question -- if there is a monitoring program, what exactly are they monitoring? What's in our food that would be worth this much trouble?
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