Las Vegas NowI-Team: The Killing Fields, Part 2

I-Team: The Killing Fields, Part 2

How safe is our meat supply? The USDA assures us there is almost no chance a consumer will be infected with mad cow disease, the same ailment that caused dozens of deaths in England and led to the slaughter of a million cattle. Critics say there are glaring loopholes in meat safety programs and it might have a connection to weird cattle mutilations.

Back in February, the USDA ordered the largest meat recall in U.S. history -- 143 million pounds of beef -- much of it bound for school lunch programs. The action was taken because a so-called downer cow, a presumably sick animal, was processed in violation of regulations.

Read more at Earthfiles

But the USDA didn't catch the error, animal activists did. Critics say USDA seems much more interested in protecting meat producers than consumers.

So how does this relate to the weird phenomena known as animal mutilations? Thousands of ranchers, all across the country, have learned the harsh lesson about mystery mutilations. A ranch in northeastern Utah lost 14 expensive animals in less than two years, carved up with surgical precision. Another ranch in northern Nevada has been hit seven times in the last eight years.

Dr. Colm Kelleher says many of the cases have no apparent explanation. Some coincide with the appearance of UFO's. Others, though, appear to be the work of unknown humans who operate in silence and darkness.

Add your comments to the LasVegasNOW Blog

"There's no chance a predator could have done this, unless coyotes packed scalpels and had surgical training," he said.

Kelleher and others suspect there is a secret monitoring program underway -- tracking the spread of something through the food chain, at least through the meat supply.

"We had some where it looked like maybe a caesarian was done on the cow and the calf was removed," said former Montana Sheriff's Deputy Keith Wolverton.

Wolverton investigated dozens of mutilation cases. At one scene, he found a needle under a dead steer, "buried in the ground like it had been dropped."

A 1994 mutilation at a ranch in the Las Vegas valley indicated something like a laser was used to cut the steer.

"This stuff was all cooked -- had a cooked appearance to it," said Las Vegas veterinarian Dr. Garth Lamb.

In Alabama in the early 90's, Officer Ted Oliphant documented a correlation between cut-up cows and mystery helicopters seen by ranchers. He also found a white powder on one animal that, on analysis, appeared to be a coagulant.

In Utah, Dr. Kelleher's team found a blue gel substance on a dead cow. The gel included a chemical sedative and something like formaldehyde, substances which degrade quickly.

"95-percent of the cases are never reported. And the 5-percent that are investigated, if you get there 48 hours after the death, you're wasting your time," he said.

Kelleher isn't sure who is doing the mutilations, but is pretty sure why. His suspicions are outlined in his book Brain Trust, which traces the history of a family of brain wasting diseases, the best known being mad cow or BSE.

It's a shocking trail. Specimens obtained from diseased cannibals in New Guinea were sent to a wildlife refuge and research lab in Maryland, where researchers associated with biological weapons programs tried to see if brain wasting diseases could be passed from species to species.

"They started injecting the ground up brains of these animals into every species they could come up with. They injected them again and again to see if this cannibal disease was transmissible. They injected chimpanzees, mice, rats, guinea pigs, sheep, deer. We know there were several escapes of the animals that occurred during this process," he said.

The agent which causes mad cow is an essentially indestructible protein known as prions. Kelleher believes the infected prions that cause mad cow slipped into the food chain when deer escaped from the Maryland lab.

The USDA has repeatedly assured consumers that our meat supply is safe. But in incident after incident, the horrors of American slaughterhouses have been well documented, and oversight has been sorely lacking.

As a recent hidden-camera incident documented, so-called downer cows, the ones most likely to carry the infected mad cow prions, can still get into the food supply. Today, only 1-percent of the 35 million cattle slaughtered in the U.S. each year are tested for mad cow.

The USDA has prohibited private meatpackers from testing more.

The animal parts removed during most mutilations are exactly what would be taken by someone looking for prion contamination, Kelleher says. By doing their sampling in secrecy, under the guise of weird mutilations, the mystery surgeons avoid serious scrutiny and don't alarm the meat eating public.

"You're monitoring this because the last thing you want to do is create a public panic, and essentially say to the American public that eating beef is not safe," he said.

Officially, we don't have any mad cow cases in humans in the U.S., but Dr. Kelleher thinks there are disturbing similarities between mad cow and other diseases such as CJD and even Alzheimer's. There have been outbreaks or clusters around the country, possibly linked to the consumption of meat. It might be a much bigger problem than anyone imagines, he and others allege, and it needs to be investigated.

Email your comments to Chief Investigative Reporter George Knapp