Hunt for the Skinwalker
Science confronts the Unexplained at
a Remote Ranch in Utah
by Colm A. Kelleher and George Knapp.
Chapter 10
Mutes
They come in the dark of night. Healthy cattle are silently and skillfully killed and their organs are removed, usually an eye, a tongue, an ear, reproductive organs, and the rear end. We have spoken to many veterinarians who marvel at the precision and skill of the cuts. The cattle surgeons are indeed superb at what they do. From 1975 to 1977, in two Colorado counties alone, there were nearly two hundred reports of mutilated cattle. Governor Richard D. Lamm flew to Pueblo on September 4, 1975, to confer with the executive board of the Cattlemen’s Association about the mutilations, which he called “one of the greatest outrages in the history of the western cattle industry.” The governor added, “It is no longer possible to blame predators for the mutilations.” In the 1970s, in addition to the scores of cases in northeastern Colorado, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of animal mutilation reports were investigated by local law enforcement with cases occurring in fifteen states, from Minnesota and South Dakota and Montana to New Mexico and Texas.
So great was the alarm of ranchers that in April of 1979, ex-astronaut and then New Mexico senator Harrison Schmitt held a one-day hearing on cattle mutilations in Albuquerque. Schmitt began the hearings by saying, “There are few activities more dangerous than an unsolved pattern of crime. There is always the potential for such crimes to escalate in frequency and severity if allowed to go unsolved and unpunished.. .In the last five years—and probably longer—in at least fifteen states animals have been killed and systematically mutilated for no apparent purpose, by persons unknown.” In those days, cattle mutilations were taken seriously by politicians, not least because in several states, angry ranchers, convinced that this was an illegal government operation, had begun firing at low-flying National Guard and other military helicopters.
Immediately following the New Mexico conference, a New Mexico state research stipend funded a formal investigation of the cattle mutilation phenomena, and retired FBI bank robber expert Ken Rommel was hired to lead the investigation. Unfortunately, Rommel knew very little about pathology, he knew nothing about the procedures for conducting necropsies, and he entered the topic with his mind made up that this was nothing more than a few ignorant, uneducated ranchers misidentifying perfectly ordinary predator or scavenger attacks. For six months, Rommel sat on the back of a horse and took a few cursory photographs of dead cows, then he filed a three-hundred-page report “showing” that cattle mutilations were actually caused by predators or scavengers. Not a single necropsy was conducted during this period by Rommel’s team, nor was even rudimentary pathology carried out. In short, the investigation was undistinguished and lacked any thoroughness. The report was published with much fanfare, “solving” the cattle mutilation mystery, and it provided the perfect rationale for many veterinarians and law enforcement officers to avoid the often disgusting and bizarre subject.[typical FBI cover up, they are a disgrace to this country,and this agency needs to be put to rest for the good of the American People. FBI, nothing more then a gestapo for the elite DC]
While there are good arguments to be made that a large number of cattle mutilations are actually a covert monitoring operation for infectious diseases—diseases that are deemed necessary by the agriculture and health authorities to keep under wraps for fear of scaring the public—a smaller but undetermined number of cattle mutilations are clearly carried out with a different aim. And if that aim is to strike fear and or terror into the local community, then they have certainly succeeded.
Cattle mutilations are distinguished by the anomalously sudden death of the animals with rarely any signs of a struggle. Normally when an animal dies, even when it is butchered, it will thrash its legs or struggle in the final throes of death agony. Not so with the cattle mutilations. No tracks, human footprints, or tire marks are usually detected on the scene. This lack of evidence is frustrating to the legions of law enforcement professionals who have unsuccessfully investigated cattle mutilations.
Police investigations into cattle mutilations usually fall into one of two categories. Most police feel disgust and intimidation, and are less than motivated to investigate. Others dismiss the mutilation as the work of predators or scavengers. But to a few, animal mutilations are a crime; an affront to a family and its property, and they do an excellent job investigating the cases. Sheriff Tex Graves from Sterling, Colorado; Deputy Wyatt Goring from Cache County, Utah; Captain Keith Wolverton from Great Falls, Montana, Tommy Blann from Texas; officer Ted Oliphant from Fyffe, Alabama; and officer Gabe Valdez from Dulce, New Mexico, are all members of the select group of police officers who did not run away or attempt to ridicule cattle mutilations. And oftentimes they suffered for their bravery and diligence. In spite of their conscientiousness and that of their colleagues, cattle mutilations today remain a law enforcement enigma. Not a single person has been caught or charged in the entire thirtyfive year history of the phenomenon.
The paranormal cattle mutilations may have been around a long time. According to researcher Tommy Blann, precise mutilations of livestock have been recorded in England and Scotland as far back as 1810. And Jacques Vallee described an early cattle mutilation that took place in the 1890s when a farmer walked into his backyard and over his field saw a cigar-shaped craft floating about forty feet off the ground. Below was one of his cows dangling by a thick cord. The craft got away, but he found his cow dead and badly cut and burned across the street the next day.
In 1967, a horse called Lady died under suspicious circumstances in the San Luis Valley in Colorado. The San Luis Valley was home to an almost infinite variety of legendary paranormal activity, so it was perhaps fitting that the first widely reported mutilation case would take place there. After this initial incident, the action started in Minnesota and North Dakota and within months had moved to northeastern Colorado.
There are no hard estimates of how frequently cattle mutilations occur, but it is certain that only a minority get reported. The stigma associated with a bizarre, satanic, cult like phenomenon mixed with a hint of psychological warfare is simply too much for most God-fearing ranching families. It is the exception rather than the rule to go public with these reports. Most just bury the remains of the unfortunate animal and hope that the problem goes away.
Cattle mutilations were not unknown in the Uinta Basin before the arrival of the Gorman family in 1994. Local police had already investigated a couple of dozen cases in the 1970s, many within striking distance of the ranch. Even back in the 1960s, according to local eyewitnesses, there was evidence of cattle mutilations on the very property that the Gormans would move onto. In hindsight, locals remember a series of particularly grisly mutilations in the 1960s and the 1970s on that very same acreage. And the surrounding ranches were not immune.
In fact, the Uinta Basin became such a hotbed of cattle mutilation in the 1970s that well-known mutilation investigator Carl Whiteside from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation even made it a practice to take the trip across the Utah-Colorado border in a helicopter to land near felled animals in farmers’ fields. Local ranchers in the Uinta Basin still talk about the Colorado investigative team’s unbelievable rudeness and obnoxious behavior. And what was their diagnosis after investigating multiple cases? Predators. But a small number of veterinarians who have had the courage to go to the scene of the mutilations and investigate the cause of death tend to rule out the predator-scavenger theory in favor of something much more sinister. The deliberate killing of the cattle and precise surgical removal of organs has been described on numerous occasions.
So, unknown to Gorman, his ranch was not unique in the long history of the cattle mutilation phenomenon. It was unusual, but not unique, for so many animals to be killed and to disappear from a single ranch in such a short period of time. (When it occurs, it usually involves insurance fraud.) There had been other examples, some well-known and some not so famous, of dozens of livestock being lost to the phantom surgeons from a single ranch over a relatively short period of time. For example, a ranch in northern New Mexico had lost a few dozen animals in the 1990s, and another well-known ranch in northern California had also suffered in excess of thirty animals killed or missing during the 1990s. And a Canadian ranch near Makwa in northwestern Saskatchewan lost more than a dozen animals to mutilations over a two-year period around 1995.
But by and large, the focused decimation of a single herd is unusual. Gorman may have been relatively atypical in having so many registered animals mutilated or missing over a fifteen-month period. But the consequences to the Gorman family were both economically and psychologically devastating. They were being harassed on their own property by a ruthless and unseen enemy.
Chapter 11
Orbs
Tom and Ellen Gorman stood outside their homestead looking west. It was evening. The summer was coming and the chill of the winter air was no longer apparent. Both were stressed. They watched their cattle grazing several hundred yards away on the lush pasture and, just to the south, three of their horses munched on the grass. Tom could tell there was something wrong: the cattle and the horses were restless.
Tom was the first to see it, as he was quick to notice anything slightly out of place. He stiffened. A blue orb was flying in the tree line next to his horses. He felt Ellen beside him tensing as she too saw it. The intense blue light cast by the object was easily visible as it flew through the trees. They both watched as it emerged from the tree line and slowly flew around the head of one of the horses. The horse noticed it too and impatiently shook his head as if trying to rid a swarm of flies. The darting orb was close enough to illuminate the animal in an eerie bright blue glow. Tom was puzzled by the fact the horse never registered alarm. Normally the blue orbs caused extreme stress in animals.
Suddenly, the blue object darted away from the horses and, with astonishing speed, moved closer to the Gormans. It stopped abruptly in midair about fifteen feet above the ground and hovered silently about twenty feet from them. This was easily the best view they had ever had of the elusive blue orbs. They watched, fascinated, as the object hung in the air, apparently defying the laws of gravity. The exterior of the orb was a clear, hard shell not unlike glass. It was maybe two or three times the size of a baseball. And inside the glasslike exterior, moved a swirling, intensely blue substance. It seemed to Tom like a liquid beginning to boil, a nearly bubbling incandescent blue fluid. He could hear a faint crackling sound from the object like static electricity sometimes makes.
As Tom watched this amazing spectacle, the hair on the back of his neck rose. He could feel a wave of deep, naked fear washing over him. He felt paralyzed with the deepest, most visceral fear he had ever known. It was overwhelming. Wild animals had trapped Tom, he had been close to death, but he had never felt anything like the intensity of the terror he felt now. He knew Ellen was feeling the same because she had begun to hyperventilate. She gasped deeply and her body had begun to shake. Tom felt like he was going to have a seizure.
Suddenly Ellen, who was whimpering with terror, turned on her flashlight. The effect was instantaneous. The blue orb darted abruptly into the branches of the nearby tree as if trying to avoid the flashlight’s beam. It maneuvered effortlessly through the branches at high speed. It was obvious to them that the orb was under intelligent control. Then as abruptly as the object had darted into the trees, it suddenly shot out of sight behind their homestead.
Ellen sank to her knees, weeping. Tom also felt weak. His legs could barely hold him. But the overwhelming, paralyzing terror he had felt had vanished. It was like a switch had been abruptly thrown. The aftereffects of that bolt of adrenaline were obvious. Perspiration poured from his body, and his legs and arms began shaking violently. He too sank to his knees and put his arms around his violently trembling wife. She continued weeping. He felt helpless to comfort her and could not manage a reassuring word. As his shaking subsided, he felt only numbness inside. He also felt relief. And puzzlement. How could that orb have provoked such abject terror in both of them?
Tom knew that the fear he had felt was artificial. It had not been a normal response for him. He guessed that this bright blue orb had deliberately manipulated his emotions. How could this be? he wondered. Ellen buried her face is his chest, saying over and over, “We have to leave this place, we have to leave this place.” He nodded absently. He knew that his wife was nearing her breaking point. More than a year of relentless psychological warfare by a technology that seemed capable of anticipating their responses even before they reacted had begun taking a deep toll on her and, he knew, his children.
Two hours later, Tom and Ellen were in the living room recovering but exhausted and emotionally spent. Out of the corner of his eye, Tom noticed the signature blue glow outside the window. He stiffened. Ellen gasped in alarm. Both of them watched as it moved slowly past their window, flying lazily. The lights in the living room dimmed as the blue orb flew past, leaving a murky yellow glow inside the house. As the incandescent blue sphere traversed the end of their homestead, the lights inside the house brightened again as if on a dimmer switch. But there were no dimmer switches in their home. They both rushed to the front door in time to see the blue glow floating lazily over the ridge about a hundred yards away. Their bright yard light had also dimmed as the orb moved past and it gradually regained its normal brightness. Neither of them slept much that night. Ellen cried a lot.
The mysterious events were happening thick and fast, against a backdrop of the continuing disappearance of objects both inside and outside the house. Tom eventually found his missing post digger. The only trouble was he found it perched twenty feet up a tree. It would have taken somebody of great strength to lift a seventy-pound post digger up into a tree. The mysteries deepened.
By the end of June 1996, stories and rumors had begun circulating about weird events taking place at a remote ranch in northeastern Utah. Tom groaned. It was only a matter of time before the media got involved and the family’s much-prized privacy would be history. One day shortly afterward, as if to confirm their fears, Tom and his son Tad watched a vehicle drive slowly from the entrance gate all the way down to the homestead. As the bouncing vehicle approached, Tom could see a large, blond haired man at the wheel. Hiding his annoyance, Tom nodded as the stranger dismounted from the vehicle. The guy was broad shouldered and over six foot two. It did not take him long to dispose of the pleasantries. The stranger explained that he had learned about the bizarre events on the property “on the grapevine” and had driven a long distance to visit. Tom interrupted to reiterate that this was private property and that neither he nor his family were interested in developing the land as a tourist attraction. The stranger was insistent, even pleading. All he wanted to do, he explained, was to go onto the property and meditate. Tom could see his son grinning to himself, and eventually, half in amusement at the bizarre request, Tom relented.
The three of them piled into Tom’s diesel truck and headed down into the ranch. After about a mile, the stranger announced that he would like to meditate here, near a small pasture surrounded by trees. The stranger walked into the middle of the open ground, about a hundred yards from the tree line. Tom walked with him a short distance and then stood watching. He glanced back at his still grinning son who had elected to stay by the truck. Tom was about thirty yards from the stranger, who had closed his eyes and, in a faintly religious gesture, had spread both his arms out. Tom was amused.
Silence reigned and the late afternoon sun cast a beautiful light on the scene, this tall blond man standing silently in the middle of the pasture with his eyes closed and his arms raised, much like the pose struck by saints and angels in religious paintings. In the distance Tom heard the sudden chime of a cowbell. He was puzzled. None of his animals had cowbells. The sound seemed to be coming from deep within the trees. There it was again, nearer this time. The stranger seemed not to have heard it. Tad made a gesture of puzzlement. Tom looked at the trees and thought he could see a faint blur. Something was moving very quickly between the trees. Tom could not make out the shape, but he knew it was big. Was that the source of the cowbell sound? He watched carefully as the shape moved like a fast blur from tree to tree. It was almost as if it was circling. Tom suddenly felt uneasy.
Without warning, something broke from the tree line and moved swiftly toward the meditating man. Tom blinked. He still couldn’t see what it was even though it was broad daylight. It was blurred as if it was hidden in the middle of heat distortion, and it was covering ground at enormous speed. Gorman realized that this chimera was making a beeline for the blissful meditator, who was completely unaware of what was rapidly bearing down on him. Tom was about to yell a warning, but it was too late. The shimmering wraithlike huge “thing” had stopped just inches from the meditator as it let out a deep-throated animal roar that echoed around the ranch. The roar sounded half like a bear, half like a lion. Tom froze.
The stranger leaped back about ten feet and fell down. He began screaming. As fast as it had approached, the shimmering, almost invisible “creature” departed for the tree line at top speed. Tom’s sharp eyes could make out only a blur of dancing, flickering, wavy lines, like pixilated blocks. Within seconds, the creature had vanished into the trees.
The visitor was on the ground, still screaming hysterically, and Tom hurried over to make sure he had not been injured. Suddenly, the stranger jumped up and threw his arms around Tom, weeping like a baby.
He was obviously out of his mind with fear. Tom struggled to extricate himself, but the guy was big and he was possessed of a strength borne of blind panic. He simply would not let go. After a few minutes, Tom said quietly, “If you do not let go, I am going to hit you.”
“I will let go, if you promise to get me to my vehicle,” the stranger babbled. His ruddy face had turned chalk white and it was obvious he felt the fear of God. Slowly, with the man still hanging on to him, Tom made his way to the truck. His son started the engine and Tom, with his cargo of blubbering humanity, climbed into the back seat. The stranger swore that this property was cursed and that he would never set foot on it again. Of that, Tom was thankful.
They watched as the stranger drove erratically toward the gate. He was driving dangerously fast on the rutted track and Tom hoped he would slow down once he got on the country road. Tad was still shaken. That roar had penetrated to the very core of their being. It was like being shot with a bullet.
Some time later, as Tom and Tad were watching the movie Predator, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura battle an alien life-form in a jungle in Central America, they let out a loud yell when they first saw the shimmering creature. “That’s what we saw,” they yelled in unison to the astonished family. The predator in the movie seemed to exactly encapsulate the degree of camouflage of what they had seen. Tom calculated that the thing they saw was moving at between fifty and sixty miles per hour when it broke cover from the trees.
Again Tom wondered if his ranch had become a testing ground for advanced military equipment. Now suddenly the list had expanded beyond high-tech aircraft and surgical derring-do to advanced camouflage technology. But why would some kind of super tech advanced vehicle emit a roar? Was it possible that a creature could have advanced camouflage capabilities? Like a chameleon taken to the next level? Tom refused to dwell too deeply on what that creature might do if it decided to harm his family.
He already knew what the creature was capable of.
On one April evening in 1996, Tom sat outside, looking west and trying to relax. The beauty of this property was undeniable, yet the family was feeling overwhelmed by the stress caused by the strange phenomena. His three dogs sat contentedly beside him. Tom was grateful for such loyal dogs. All three were heelers. They were gentle with the family but absolutely ruthless with strangers. They were also aggressive cattle dogs. The cattle knew when to obey these animals, and he could rely on them to defend his valuable, artificially inseminated breeders against the numerous coyotes, raccoons, and wild dogs that moved through his property. All in all he was feeling almost content.
It had become a regular occurrence now to see a large orange something hovering slightly above the cottonwood trees about a mile west of where he sat. It did not particularly concern him, as he had seen these large orange things dozens of times before. Gorman had spent hours looking at them over time through the rifle scope that he carried with him to enhance his already superb eyesight. Very occasionally, Gorman had seen objects flying out of these orange things, as if they were windows into another dimension. He had little understanding of the physics involved. All he knew was that he wished they would go away.
Then he spotted an object in the distance at the far end of the pasture. The sight gave him a chill. A small flash of intense blue. Tom straightened in his chair, all pretense at relaxation gone. The dogs also took notice and began their low-pitched growls. He saw it again, and it was only three hundred yards away, moving swiftly along the bottom of his pasture in a north-south direction. It was less than ten feet off the ground. When it got to the southern end of his pasture, it abruptly turned and began flying in Tom’s direction. He tensed. He could see it much more clearly now: a perfectly round, intense blue orb, bigger than a baseball and capable of very sophisticated, intelligent maneuvers. He had seen them so many times on his property before. And they usually signaled trouble. His dogs were barking. The object was now less than a hundred yards away and it had changed direction again. It was moving north, parallel to Tom’s position.
Without really thinking, he set his dogs loose. Usually he kept them beside him when these things were flying around, but tonight he lost his patience. His three dogs took off at top speed in the direction of the blue orb. It didn’t seem to react to their presence until the animals got much nearer. Then it dipped down and descended until it was only a few feet off the ground. The three dogs began leaping at the object.
They were snarling with jaws snapping. Each time the animals leaped at the orb, it skillfully moved out of the way, the jaws missing sometimes only by inches.
This strange ritual began to play itself out. It was apparent that the dogs were becoming incensed with this strange object that danced out of the way at the last moment but then dipped down again so that they could lunge at it again. The intense blue orb seemed to be deliberately teasing the enraged dogs.
Tom was getting increasingly uneasy as the game of catch moved in the direction of a thick copse of trees a couple hundred yards to his south. He sensed that the orbs seemed to be steering the dogs toward the cover. A couple of minutes later the orb dipped to the ground and with almost languorous speed flew slowly among the trees. The snarling, eager dogs gave chase. Suddenly, Gorman heard sounds that chilled him to the bone: the unmistakable fear-filled yelps of dogs in mortal agony. Then an eerie silence. Nothing moved. Tom waited for his animals to return. After a couple of hours, he went into the homestead with a heavy heart. He decided not to look for them until morning.
His worst fears were realized when he went down the following morning to inspect the copse of trees. A smell of burned flesh greeted his nostrils as he dipped his head beneath the low branches. Ten yards inside was a small clearing. Tears filled Tom’s eyes. Three large circles of brown, dried out grass were in the middle of the clearing. At the center of each circle of shriveled vegetation was a blackish greasy mess. The stink of his incinerated dogs was awful. Tom rushed out of the copse, his mouth dry and his stomach heaving.
Within hours, Tom had gathered his family and finally agreed, as they had insisted, to sell the ranch. The ruthless killing of his favorite companions was the last straw for Tom, who after fighting an unseen, unknown enemy, reluctantly surrendered. By July 1996, the family had had enough. None of them had slept well for months. Now the Gormans finally understood the weird arrangement of dead bolts they had found throughout the house a mere twenty months before.
The story of the Gorman ranch had hit the newspapers and it ricocheted around the country. It wasn’t long before it caught the attention of one of the most powerful businessmen in North America and his organization, the National Institute for Discovery Science.
Part II
The Investigation Begins
Chapter 12
Science
The National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) was an ambitious undertaking. Never before had a scientific organization been created and, more important, funded in order to bring scientific rigor to what was essentially paranormal research. When I saw the NIDS ad looking for interested scientists in the prestigious journal Science, I leaped at the chance to do revolutionary science in an area where few scientists had previously ventured. In answering the recruitment ad, the words of one of my postdoctoral mentors came to mind: “If you want to catch a big fish, the best way is to fish in waters that are unpopulated by other fishermen.” Within a few months of joining this brand-new organization in the summer of 1996, I began to see NIDS as a way to roll back the frontiers of discovery science while working with some of the most brilliant people I had ever met.
In addition to the two PhD scientists working with me, NIDS had a world-class, multidisciplinary advisory board that had been carefully hand-picked from an array of disciplines in mainstream science. NIDS wanted to bring as broad a range of expertise and technology as possible to bear on UFOs and other problems that mainstream science had thus far ignored. The study of so-called paranormal events had always been starved of funding, and NIDS, which was started by Las Vegas real estate tycoon Bob Bigelow, was designed to remedy that situation.
Shortly after NIDS staff was hired, we heard about what was happening on the Gorman ranch. The opportunity it presented seemed ideal. The idea of a field station, or “laboratory in the wild,” that would bring all NIDS resources to bear to study it gained traction and quickly came to fruition. Within a few short weeks, NIDS bought the Gorman ranch in Utah.
The Gorman family was finally free to leave the property on which they had been held hostage for more than eighteen months. They purchased a small ranch twenty-five miles away, and Ellen, Tom, and the children quickly made it their home. At the time, they told me that they wouldn’t care if they never set foot on their old ranch again. There was fear mixed with revulsion in their reaction. Three of the Gormans were supremely happy to move on and to bring this part of their lives to a close.
But Tom Gorman was not quite ready to do so. He is a proud man and was outraged at being thrown off his land by something he didn’t understand. In the space of eighteen to twenty months, someone or something had killed or stolen fourteen registered cattle out of a herd of eighty animals, an attrition rate approaching 20 percent. Each of the animals was worth a couple of thousand dollars. Economically, the family was devastated. Even with such high-end cattle, the profit margin for ranching was slim. But in addition to the financial losses, Gorman’s family had been reduced to barely surviving automatons because of stress and sleep deprivation. Their kids’ grades had suffered drastically in school and they were the butt of jokes in the community once the media took an active interest in their story.
Within a couple of weeks of the transfer of ownership, Tom decided to take a job as the NIDS ranch manager to help us come to grips with who or what had run him off his land. NIDS purchased a few dozen cows and Tom kept several more on the property to be used as bait. With remarkable self discipline, Gorman arrived at what had been his property every day. Once he had been owner, now he was an employee. He took care of the animals, supervised the irrigation, mended the broken fences, and joined the scientific teams on watches that sometimes lasted all night. On other nights, Tom returned to his family. The pace was grueling for Tom. While his family rested, his stubborn refusal to allow the phenomenon to get the best of him drove him onward. He was determined to find out more about what had terrorized his family.
I will never forget my first sight of the ranch. The team had flown up in early September 1996 to reconnoiter the area before moving the observation trailer/laboratory onto the property. It was a clear, sunny day as we drove the narrow half-mile track that ends up at the homestead where the Gormans had suffered so many sleepless nights. On our right, the red sandstone ridges jutted into the sky. I was struck by the wildness and pastoral beauty of these Utah badlands.
When I first set foot on the ranch I had the unmistakable feeling that something was not quite right.
Things were not what they seemed. Everything looked beautiful as Tom took us on the tour on that first day. We briefly met Ellen and the kids. They looked exhausted, with white faces and dark rimmed red eyes. Only later would I learn from Tom the extent of the trauma that his family had suffered.
The ranch looked spectacularly gorgeous that day. The trees had not yet shed their blooms and the cattle grazed peacefully in the fields. At the same time, in marked contrast to the serene environment, I could not shake an eerie feeling. Was I being watched? As a scientist I immediately put this feeling down to the hype and the expectation about the place, but as a human being I knew the feeling went deeper than that. Needless to say, I did not mention it until much later.
Tom then took us on a tour. We began walking west, and the first stop brought us close to his fence line. He showed us the carcasses of two of his neighbors’ cows that had gone missing a few days previously and had just been found in unlikely positions beneath the barbed-wire fence that separated the two properties. Even from fifty yards away, the air was heavy with the stench of decaying flesh. The sound of thousands of buzzing flies as they landed in the open mouths, sightless eyes, and every available orifice and exposed soft tissues of the carcasses was almost deafening.
The animals lay within thirty yards of each other with their heads under the wiring of the fence. The NIDS veterinarian thought this was an unusual position for two animals to be in at death. There were few signs of struggle near the stinking animals. We looked carefully around the vicinity, and there were no marks.
As we approached the animals, I noticed movement and I was momentarily puzzled. At first it looked like large white tarps or white plastic bags moving in the breeze near the cows’ bellies. As we got closer, I realized that I was seeing a flowing river of millions of white, glistening maggots pouring from the abdomens of both carcasses. Watching them was like seeing a single giant organism writhe and swivel in and out of the abdominal cavities. Both cows had been dead about forty-eight hours, judging by the number of maggots. Forensic scientists agree that generally it takes only a couple of minutes after death for the first blowfly to land and lay eggs on the carcass of a dead animal. Within less than a day, the first maggots appear. Meanwhile, more blowflies quickly find the dead animal and rapidly repeat the egg-laying process. At the same time, the gas from the fermenting grass inside the rumen of the cow begins to expand and bloat the belly. In the high heat and high humidity of the Utah summer, this process happens very quickly. It is never a good idea to prod or kick the swollen, bloated abdomen of a dead cow. You might cause an extremely unpleasant and smelly explosion.
Whether these two animals had died of natural or other causes was open to question since no obvious tissues were missing and the animals were far too decomposed to gain any biologically useful information from a necropsy. I was thankful for my previous experience of being around dead cows, during my experimental work on cattle in a lab in France and on another stint at a large animal facility in Ottawa, Canada. But the physicist who accompanied us on the tour was not so fortunate. A career of writing software for NASA deep-space missions had not prepared him for an up close and personal encounter with a thousand pounds of putrid, maggot-infested flesh. Within seconds, his face was turning a deep shade of gray and I noticed his vain efforts to disguise the retching in the back of his throat.
Tom took us to a small clearing about a hundred yards west of the two dead cows. Even at this distance, the acrid smell still wafted on the slight breeze. Behind a few trees, we came upon three circles of very dried grass. All around the twenty-foot-diameter circles of the desiccated grass, tall healthy green grass flourished in three-foot-high swathes. This is where Tom’s three dogs had been incinerated, he explained, still plainly upset by the memory.
As we walked on, Tom pointed out the remains of two more cows that he said had been mutilated several months previously. A shell of weathered, tanned hide surrounded both carcasses. Each animal’s bones were plainly visible, but their rear ends were missing. Since it was months after the fact, no useful information about the manner of their death could be ascertained. Tom explained that it had taken far longer than usual for the two carcasses to decompose. Usually, with the kind of temperatures and humidity in northeastern Utah, the carcasses would be bones within a few weeks. But it had taken almost a year to reduce these animals to this condition. Tom asked the veterinarian with us what could have slowed the rate of decomposition. The veterinarian shrugged. Perhaps a dramatic decrease in temperature, or a chemical had killed off the putrefying bacteria. Neither seems very likely. It was easier to believe that Tom had got his facts wrong. This was not to be the last time that NIDS would underestimate what Tom told us. We walked on.
Five hundred yards west, he showed us two circular, deep holes in the ground where soil had been removed. Tom had found several of these deep indentations, usually following a night of flying lights. The holes were about a foot deep and several feet in diameter. They sloped downward from the edges. I guessed that two or three hundred pounds of soil would have had to be removed from the ground in order to make those holes. I asked Tom if he had found soil nearby. He shook his head. He explained that the first time he had seen the holes, they had perfectly straight sides, as if a giant cookie cutter had dug in and removed the soil and grass. Over time, he explained, weathering and rain had blurred the precise cuts of the holes. Now, with grass beginning to grow, the holes looked obvious, but less than spectacular.
The NIDS plan was a simple one. Before anything could be accomplished, a validation process had to occur. A science team needed to personally experience the anomalous events. In other words, they had to see anomalous phenomena with their own eyes. That was the first order of business. We estimated that this phase would take a few weeks or months. Little did we know.
Chapter 13
Approach
A dramatic change occurred at the Gorman ranch in the fall of 1996. The hunter became the hunted. The phenomenon was suddenly confronted not with a family but with a scientific team whose primary motivation was not fear but curiosity. This was a significant turn of events for something—whatever it was—that had, for all intents and purposes, been in charge for several years. Now it was no longer in charge.
But how exactly would the scientific team carry out this highly unusual research? There were two sides to the issue. One camp argued for full instrumentation and to cover every square yard of the property with automated sensors that would constantly feed back data. The other camp argued that less is more, that too much equipment, too much activity, might even be detrimental. That was Tom Gorman’s point of view.
Tom believed that too much activity and technology was guaranteed to drive the phenomenon into hiding. He thought the NIDS group should set up a command post in nearby Roosevelt or Vernal and silently and surreptitiously creep onto the property at night while disturbing as few geographical landmarks as possible. “This phenomenon needs to be hunted like a wild animal,” he told me on numerous occasions. “Maybe even a very smart big game animal.”
Tom also recommended a stealth method for obtaining video footage of the mysterious flying activity that haunted the ranch. He used to sneak out of his house after dark, armed with an old manual video recorder that contained as few electronics as possible. Slowly and painstakingly, often on his stomach, he would make his way down to a vantage point where the weird floating lights were often seen. That spot was about two-thirds of a mile west of his house. Like an expert hunter, he would wriggle along the ground while taking care not to break any branches or twigs, and he would remain in the same place for twenty minutes if he thought he had made the slightest noise. Sometimes he would take hours to arrive at a good location where he could observe and listen.
Tom told me he had lain almost frozen in ditches for hours while he waited to catch a few minutes of activity on videotape. Though only marginally successful, he did see numerous quietly floating lights of all shapes and sizes during these nightly forays. Tom assured me his methods were successful and had produced results, and this proved to him that whatever was terrorizing him was not necessarily omnipotent. Or maybe it was just playing with him. Maybe it could see him perfectly and was just reeling him in like a fish. Tom said he never really knew.
Whether to deploy more or less equipment and personnel was a hotly discussed issue within NIDS. There was little precedent on which to base our decision. Some members of the team researched the two best-known areas where scientific equipment had been deployed to study strange phenomena: Project Hessdalen in Norway and Gulf Breeze in Florida.
The Hessdalen Valley lies in central Norway and has been the site of numerous unexplained lights for decades. In 1984, engineer Erling Strand and others carried out a thirty-six-day instrumented coverage of the area. A magnetometer, a radio spectrum analyzer, a seismograph, cameras (some with dispersion gratings), a Geiger counter, an infrared viewer, and a laser were deployed in the area for about seven weeks as a “pilot” experiment. This short experiment established that the Hessdalen phenomenon was measurable.
The major finding was a correlation between the appearance of luminous phenomena and magnetic perturbations. Attempts at obtaining line spectra through diffraction grating analysis were unsuccessful, although fifty-three visually witnessed occurrences of unexplained lights happened and a few photographs were taken. This initial success was then translated into an expanded and automated set of measurement protocols.
In the 1990s, under the guidance of Erling Strand and Bjorn Gitle Hauge, who by then were assistant professors at 0stfold College in Sarpsborg, a real-time automated observatory, dubbed the Automated Measurement Station (AMS), was designed and built. Beginning in 1998, the AMS was deployed in the Hessdalen Valley. The AMS was equipped with automatic wide-angle and zoom video cameras able to monitor the phenomenon in real time, as well as a radar transponder and a magnetometer. During five years of operation, the AMS recorded an extremely valuable statistical variation of the lights, and it indicated that the lights were not from any mundane man-made source.
Early on, there were indications of correlations among sunspot activity, geomagnetic storms, and the appearance of the lights, although subsequent, more intensive analysis ruled out that correlation. The phenomenon was recorded more often in winter and between the hours of 10 P.M. and 1A.M. “However,” the study author noted, “these statistics.. did not lead to an understanding of the origin or nature of the phenomenon.”
Project EMBLA (Electro Magnetic Behavior of Luminous Anomalies) followed. EMBLA was a joint mission of Italian radio astronomy groups, the Italian National Research Council, and the Norwegian team. The aim was to expand the instrumentation, and three missions were deployed to the Hessdalen Valley. Thus, in August 2000, the Norwegian AMS station in Hessdalen was equipped with an additional set of automated instruments from the Italian group. These included a VLF-ELF (very low frequency-extremely low frequency) correlation receiver and spectrometer; a VLF Inspire receiver; two spectrometers; (Sentinel 1 and Sentinel 2), both centered at 1420 MHz (this frequency is used in astrophysical and SETI studies); and a wide-band antenna connected to a spectrum analyzer. All instruments in the Italian package were computer controlled. Data was recorded continuously and automatically and stored on CDROMs.
“The global picture of the phenomenon obtained so far,” the Norwegian-Italian collaborative project concluded, “shows that the phenomenon’s radiant power varies, reaching values up to 19kW. These changes are caused by the sudden surface variations of the illuminated area owing to the appearance of clusters of light balls that behave in a thermally self-regulated way. Apparent characteristics consistent with a solid are strongly suspected from the study of distributions of radiant power. Other anomalous characteristics include the capability to eject smaller light balls, some unidentified frequency shift in VLF range, and possible deposition of metallic particles.”
But the bottom line of Project EMBLA was the same: “A self-consistent definitive theory of the phenomenon’s nature and origin in all its aspects cannot be constructed yet quantitatively, but some of the observations can be explained by an electrochemical model for the ball lightning phenomenon.” A rough, albeit less elegantly phrased, translation of the above statement could be: “We don’t know what the hell is going on.”
As the chief field research scientist at NIDS (members of the esteemed science advisory board were usually not part of the field research teams, although they participated on occasion), I and others spent hours discussing the Hessdalen project with Erling Strand and his group. What emerged is glaringly absent from the scientific discussion of the Hessdalen instrumentation packages and research program. When I asked him, “What do the local residents of the Hessdalen Valley experience?” Erling answered that there were multiple reports of bizarre encounters with UFOs, and reports of abductions and other odd events had been commonplace in the valley for decades. The engineers in the AMS project had little motivation or interest in pursuing this angle. They focused, quite rightly, on perfecting the ability to measure these phenomena, not delving into the phenomenology and sociology of the reports. But I wonder if the locals might not have provided the group with fresh insight into what was going on in the valley. There was obviously an unbridgeable gulf separating the engineers and their instrumentation from the soft squishy stories with no physical evidence of abductions, “huge triangular^ craft, UFO lore, strange creatures, etc. In August 2004, Project Hessdalen was suspended due to financial difficulties.
Gulf Breeze is the other hot spot that received scientific attention for a brief period of time. An unprecedented series of sightings took place in this town on the Florida panhandle between November 1990 and July 1992. “During that time,” reported physicist Bruce Maccabee, “the Gulf Breeze Research Team (GBRT) logged about 170 sightings, most of which involved multiple witnesses and most of which included still photography with telephoto lenses and/or recording by video cameras. In several cases a light was observed simultaneously by two separated groups of people thereby allowing for triangulation. In one case infrared sensitive film detected a change in the output radiation from a light and in another case a diffraction grating was used to obtain a spectrum of a Bubba UFO [the unknown flying thing got its name when the Skywatchers in Gulf Breeze kept shouting, “Look over there, Bubba!”] and also the spectrum of a red road flare. The spectra were found to be different.”
The sightings at Gulf Breeze continued for a few months and provoked enough interest that a UFO detection van was assembled in Canada and the United States by a private engineering firm. The van rolled into Gulf Breeze, and a few nights later, the activity stopped. Only a couple of anomalous magnetic field measurements were made before the UFO activity terminated. The attempt to instrument the area was eventually aborted because of a lack of activity.
The full impact of these studies would elude us for several years.
In early September 1996, the NIDS team, which was then composed of a physicist, a veterinarian— both of whom do not want their names revealed—and myself, moved into an observation trailer that had been rapidly deployed on the property. We had begun to execute our plan—against Tom’s better judgment. Our aim was to gather data in the electromagnetic and magnetic regions, as well as a visible UV spectrum of any UFO lights. To accomplish this, over the course of the next few months we assembled a light-gathering device with a Fresnel lens. This large-diameter lens was designed to focus light onto an optic fiber, which in turn fed directly into a portable handheld spectrometer purchased from Ocean Optics. The spectrometer was literally palm-sized and was linked to a laptop computer. This immensely portable station was ideal for investigating different areas of the ranch and was used to gather real-time spectra in UV and visible ranges. The spectra were then stored on the laptop to be analyzed as needed. In addition to this, the team had a very portable assortment of night vision binoculars, video cameras (with night-vision attachments), radio frequency analyzers, microwave detectors, etc. We also hired a couple of additional investigators.
In the early phase of the NIDS project, two teams were deployed on the property every night. The teams communicated with Motorola walkie-talkies. Each team had at least one scientist and one or two investigators. The teams’ mandate was to capture evidence of any unusual events on videotape and cameras. This way the data, if any, could be impartially scrutinized and critiqued by the fifteen member Science Advisory Board. During this initial start-up phase, the advisory board regularly flew into Las Vegas for intensive two-day briefings by the scientific field staff.
On September 16, 1996, at about 1:30A.M. , the team had moved into the observation trailer to take a break, when out of the window somebody spotted a light over the cottonwood trees at the west end of the ranch. I was there with Tom and two scientists. The light was so bright that we at first thought it might be a flare. It hovered for about ten minutes above the distant tree line, moved down out of sight, and then back up. We all agreed that the behavior and the appearance of the light were unlike any aircraft, helicopter, flare, star, or planet. In short, the object was unidentified. Cameras, night-vision devices, and digital video images did little to resolve the distant light. We took several photos that showed nothing but a tiny distant light.
Nevertheless, the appearance of this distant object was cause for excitement among the science crew. Though it was a good distance away, it was definitely unidentified. And it was a tiny first step on the road to confirming what Tom had been seeing. But we agreed that the sighting, although unexplained, was also profoundly mundane. It did not really qualify as an independent validation of Tom’s observations as defined by the NIDS plan. The sighting did serve as an excellent morale booster, however, and the night watches were redoubled.
We felt we were ready for anything.
Chapter 14
Cat and Mouse
Week after week during October and November of 1996, the team flew from Las Vegas to Utah to conduct night watches and to begin the process of interviewing locals in the area. The Ute Indians were very cooperative and gracious. It turned out that several tribe members had multiple experiences with weird flying objects in the previous decades. In other words, what had happened on the ranch was not isolated. It was a part of an overall pattern. [that light they first seen in the trailer was one of the large triangle objects on edge facing them,at another angle it would appear to the human eye as 3 lights in triangle form.I do not know how I know that, but I know it is the truth.DC]
NIDS personnel also interviewed neighbors who were not Native Americans and found them polite but reserved. After several weeks of visits, they began to talk. They had experienced the same thing as their Ute neighbors had. The ranches bordering on what was now the NIDS property had had their fair share of weird activity, so whatever was going on at the ranch was also common in the area. In the early months of this project, NIDS assembled a library of dozens of tape-recorded interviews from local basin residents about strange events that had occurred over the years near the ranch, including cattle mutilations and sightings of multiple colored balls of light and a large triangular shaped object.[perhaps because I seen this triangle twice in the Las Vegas night sky?One time was after the events in Phoenix,the second time,was under different circumstances. DC]
Few locals were willing to talk about these experiences on the record, however. One neighbor, whom we will call Mr. Gonzalez, explained how he lost many cattle over the years. Back in 1995, he remembered finding a recumbent cow lying out in a field where she shouldn’t have been. The rest of the animals were in a field nearby and there were no broken fence lines. The old rancher described going out to his eight-year-old cow and finding that she had two broken legs. Alarmed, he ran back inside to get a blanket to cover the shivering animal. The cow was obviously suffering and in shock. He suspected he might have to put her down.
Gonzalez was astonished when he returned with the blanket five minutes later to discover that the animal was gone. He looked everywhere but couldn’t find her. The field was an open pasture with no rocks or trees behind which an animal could hide. Yet in the space of a few minutes, in daylight, a cow with two broken legs had vanished. An hour later he looked out his window. It was now afternoon. He told me he nearly fainted when he saw the cow lying in the same field but about fifty yards from her original position. He ran out to the suffering animal and examined her closely. This time all four legs were broken. He ran inside to get his gun and quickly put the poor animal out of its misery. After thinking long and hard about this bizarre incident, Gonzalez concluded that the animal must have twice been lifted into some aircraft and twice been dropped into the field. Each time two of her legs had been broken. This was the only explanation that seemed to fit the facts. We didn’t argue with him.
In our many hours of conversation, Gonzalez and his family related dozens of odd incidents to us. These incidents, though they differed from the Gormans’ own, convinced us that the ranch was by no means a unique piece of real estate in the area. The family told us about strange Mexican-hat-shaped flying objects that flew and hovered over the ridge a mere hundred yards from their home. Mrs. Gonzalez told us that she was returning one night from the small town of Fort Duchesne, when she saw a fast-moving silvery object that rapidly descended in the direction of the red-rock ridge near her home. The object accelerated as it neared the ground, and she waited fearfully for the explosion that would surely engulf her. Instead, the silvery aircraft smoothly flew into the ridge as if it didn’t exist. She told her family about it when she returned home.
On the evening of November 10, 1996, my phone rang. It was Tom Gorman. The NIDS team was due to return to Utah the next day for yet another stint of stargazing by night and patrolling the ranch and interviewing locals by day. In his usual gruff but very precise way, Tom described what had just happened to him. He was knocking off work when he saw three yellow-colored headlights flying in close formation only a few feet off the ground near the southwestern border of the property. Cattle were rarely grazed there. The lights looked like those he had seen countless times before.
Early the next morning, the NIDS scientific team was in the air, on the way to Utah to investigate the phenomena. Tom met us, and immediately we trekked through the dense vegetation to the spot where he was sure the object had been. We had with us an array of small portable detectors. The team, as planned, split up and began quartering the several-hundred-square-yard desert looking for any tracks or anything out of the ordinary. We spent several hours doing it but saw nothing. At the same time we scanned the fine sandy soil in scores of places for any traces of nuclear radiation, for any magnetic field signatures. We found nothing. Wearily, we returned to the observation lab. That night we deployed in one area for several hours, then gave up and deployed on the eastern end of the property for several more hours. We saw nothing.
Three nights later, on November 13, at 1:30 A.M. , I was deployed with one member of the scientific team close to the observation trailer. We had been watching the area for several hours. Another team was deployed down at the western end of the ranch. We communicated by walkie-talkies only when absolutely necessary. We were both looking at the night sky when suddenly, out of nowhere, a silent, bright yellow light came speeding out of the night from over the lip of the ridge. It was moving as fast as a high-speed jet aircraft but made no sound.
As we watched in shock, the object did a perfect 360-degree circle right over us, again in complete silence, and then zoomed rapidly north. As it headed back over the ridge, I managed to quickly take a couple of photographs. In seconds the flying mystery was gone. The photos, later developed, only showed a dimly visible, blurry light. The fast, silent object had caught us unawares and departed before we could spring into action. Nevertheless, the sighting by two members of the scientific team represented a validation. But again, the event was much too transient for any meaningful interpretation. At night it is extremely difficult to accurately estimate either altitude or distance, and this object proved no exception.
The snows then came to Utah. The NIDS team stayed on regular night watches until the end of November and then, as the temperature dropped below zero, we returned to Nevada and remained on call. December 1996 passed without event and northeastern Utah entered into a deep freeze. We had telephone briefings and conversations with Tom at least weekly. Because of the extreme temperatures, he had pulled all cattle except a few calves in the corral off the ranch and was feeding them at an indoor facility. Tom told us to keep away until the temperature started climbing up again in March.
But on January 21, 1997, something very strange happened. Tom called us the next day and reported injuries to the ear and eyes of three calves in the corral near the observation trailer. The injuries occurred during an intense snowstorm when the temperature was about 30 below, too cold even for predators, Tom assured us. We told him to call the local veterinarian and take some photos.
The photos showed three small pathetic calves huddled in the thirty-below weather. One had an ear cut up as if with pinking shears. The other two had small round holes punctured in their eyelids. Because of extreme weather conditions, and the vets’ reluctance to venture out at thirty below, it took Tom about twenty-four hours to get qualified medical examiners to the ranch.
When they finally arrived, one veterinarian said the wounds were strange and unlike anything he had seen before. This vet agreed with Tom—predators would not conduct attacks on livestock in a corral at thirty below. The second, more senior, veterinarian overruled him and insisted that it was a simple coyote or cat attack. The idea of coyotes or cats attacking calves in a corral next to a homestead in the middle of a snowstorm at thirty below struck Tom as comical.
A heated discussion took place in private between the two professionals. When the two men returned, the older vet simply said that a predator attack had occurred and to keep an eye out for further attacks. The younger kept silent and tight-lipped. “Welcome to the ambiguities in the veterinarian profession as they are forced to deal with anomalous injuries and deaths to animals,” Tom told us. “The majority of vets want nothing whatever to do with cattle mutilations, unexplained injuries to animals, or anything that might provoke gossip in the local community that might, in turn, adversely affect their business.” But as we gained more experience in dealing with vets, it became obvious that a small minority were willing to follow the data, even at the risk of ridicule from their peers.
On February 21, Tom brought his cattle back onto the ranch. He had told us that the act of bringing his cattle onto the property for the first time, back a couple of years ago, seemed to trigger an escalation of anomalous activity. So the NIDS team was expectant, waiting for the penny to drop. We did not have long to wait.
On March 10, I was working on a project in the corporate office in downtown Las Vegas when Tom phoned. I could tell by the edge in his voice that he was very disturbed. “They got a newborn calf,” he said hoarsely. “We were close by and we didn’t see or hear a damn thing.” Tom was one of the most collected, together people I had ever met, and here he was close to babbling. As I tried to calm him down, the story came out. One of his valuable Black Angus calves had just been dismembered in broad daylight.
I had a gut feeling that this might be one of those cases we were waiting for. I immediately made the necessary arrangements and less than ninety minutes later a private jet was waiting on the tarmac at McCarran Airport to whisk us to northern Utah. No other group of scientists investigating the paranormal had a private jet at their disposal. Most of them couldn’t even afford to rent a car for the weekend.
Chapter 15
The Killing
Hunched in the plane at thirty-five thousand feet, I looked out the window at the rolling clouds below and wondered what we were getting into. The aircraft hummed as we sped toward Vernal. There were three of us—the veterinarian, the physicist, and myself. We had all the equipment we needed, including all the knives and scalpels necessary to further dismember the animal during a necropsy.
Just five hours after Tom’s frantic phone call, we were standing over the animal. The late afternoon breeze blew gently, but an early spring sun was still warm on my face. We were looking at a scene of horror. I felt a churning in my stomach as I looked at the creature. This was something truly bizarre. My immediate impression was that an enormous force had ripped the animal apart. One of the leg bones was lying ten feet away, having been yanked free of the knee joint. Even with a young calf, the brute force necessary to rip a femur off a knee joint and snap a tendon suggested something very powerful.
Yet there was a fastidious delicacy to the way the mutilated calf had been carefully laid out on the grass with all four legs spread neatly away from the body. I had a momentary image of a huge amorphous creature carefully laying a limp rag doll on the grass and gently placing each of the lifeless limbs away from the torso, arranged with the finesse and attention to detail of a Japanese tea ceremony. I shuddered and banished the image from my mind. The combination of overwhelming force in ripping the calf apart and dainty precision in laying the body on the grass seemed all wrong. It disturbed me.
There was no smell. The inside of the animal looked pink and tender, very healthy and very clean, almost unnaturally clean. All of the internal organs were gone and the broken ribs jutted forlornly toward the sky. The head lay sideways, its lifeless eyes staring toward the western sun now low in the sky. We estimated that this was an eighty-four-pound calf, at least forty pounds of which were gone, if you counted its three liters of blood.
And this was the most chilling part of the scene—the complete lack of blood. It was as if a giant vacuum cleaner had gone through, in, and around the calf’s carcass and sucked up every drop of its blood. We looked for even a speck of blood on the grass or on the animal’s hide. Nothing. Not a drop. We looked at each other in stunned silence.
We ignored the temptation to scan the snow-covered perimeter of the pasture for something unworldly that still lurked out there and instead, with a tightness in our guts, went to work. We videotaped the crime scene and scanned the animal and the surrounding ground for magnetic and electric traces, for radio/microwave residue, and, for the hell of it, for nuclear radiation. No one knew who or what did this to the calf, so we thought we might as well check for everything.
I gently drew Tom aside. His normally ruddy face was the color of chalk. “Take me through it, step by step,” I said. He tried cracking jokes about maybe a coyote with a scalpel had done it, but I could tell his heart was not into making jokes. He walked me to where he had tagged the calf just a few feet away, then walked me the couple of hundred yards to the west when about forty minutes later their snarling dog had given them the first hint that something was wrong.
“No noise,” Tom said to himself, shaking his head in bewilderment. The blue heeler had still not shown up and it was now six hours later. “He just took off that way,” Tom said, pointing west. “It’s just not like him.” He rubbed his eyes wearily. No more than forty minutes had passed in daylight, during which someone or something had entered the field, ripped the young calf away from its mother (she looked like she was still limping), drained it of blood, meat, and guts, and then carefully placed it on the grass. It just did not seem possible.
I looked at the calf’s mother. She was standing a hundred feet away, her head down near the ground in a peculiar stance that exuded both aggression and fear. She was still breathing in a labored way. She never came closer as the veterinarian quickly stripped her calf’s hide. An abrupt muttered exclamation caught my attention. “Look at the sharp cut,” the vet exclaimed. “The ear was cut off with a knife or a scalpel.” He was right.
Tom nodded and said, “That ear had a big yellow plastic tag.” Looking closely, I saw the perfect incision where the cartilage and skin had been sliced. The whole ear had been cleanly removed to the skull. It was a beautiful, almost artistic, job. Even without lab pathology results, we all knew there was no way a predator or scavenger could have pulled this off. The cut was perfect and straight and had sliced cleanly through the tissue. One can easily spot the difference between the characteristic torn or ripped cattle hide of a predator or scavenger attack and the sharp cut of a scalpel or a knife when you look under a microscope. And here, even to the naked eye, this was obviously the work of a sharp instrument. The vet took samples just to make sure.
We watched silently as the vet finished the necropsy. He put the last bits of hide into labeled Ziploc bags for lab analysis. We carefully placed the torn femur into a plastic bag for forensic analysis. I looked around at the beautiful scenery and marveled that such an act of extreme violence could have taken place a few short hours ago in these pristine surroundings. Visibility through the trees and bushes on the perimeter of the large field was good, as the spring growth had not yet begun. Tom had told me this was only the second day of the thaw after winter. I scanned the entire perimeter over a hundred yards away. Nothing moved. To the north lay a ridge of reddish clay, probably weathered sandstone. The western perimeter of the pasture of the field was maybe three hundred yards away.
Before the light dimmed, we organized into groups and quartered the grass, looking for any footprints or vehicle tracks. The hard ground crunched underneath as we walked. The herd of all-black cattle kept their distance. They, too, were obviously disturbed. We agreed that the hard-packed grass could maybe have hidden some footprints but definitely not vehicle tracks. Tom watched us in bemused silence. He seemed relieved to have some company. Occasionally, we glanced nervously toward the perimeter to see if there was anything that shouldn’t be there. We stopped our search as darkness fell.
As we returned to the science observation trailer less than a hundred yards from where the animal had been torn apart, we passed the three dog kennels. I could see all three animals huddled inside. One whimpered softly. “They haven’t come out all day, even for food or water,” Tom muttered. This was unusual behavior for three aggressive dogs that were used to roaming the land and fending off the coyotes and wild dogs that routinely passed through. And his other blue heeler still had not returned, now more than twelve hours later. In fact, Gorman would never see the animal again.
We spent the following day tracking the entire pasture, looking for any evidence, especially the big bright yellow tag from the calf’s ear. We had summoned a professional tracker, who was due to arrive from Montana in a couple of days.
On the evening of March 12 we gathered in the observation trailer again to discuss the incident. The dogs had finally come out of their kennels but they were keeping close to us and the trailer. Even to my untrained eye, they had a hunted look. They were plainly still traumatized by whatever had passed through.
“Cattle are even more jumpy than yesterday,” Tom observed. He was worried. The behavior of the dogs and the cattle suggested that something was lurking nearby. Tom talked repeatedly about the possibility of a predator on the loose. He simply couldn’t fathom how somebody with equipment, including sharp instruments, could have pulled off this killing, with both him and his wife only a few hundred yards away. All of us knew from experience that Tom had uncannily sharp eyes and a keen sense of hearing.
Then, shortly after 11 P.M. , all dogs suddenly started howling and barking hysterically. Tom, the physicist, and I leaped to our feet and ran out the door and into the cold clear night. We headed for Tom’s old beat-up truck. On the driver’s side, Tom had affixed a powerful spotlight that was easily maneuverable. He normally drove through his cattle at night during calving season, lighting up the animals as he drove. The powerful spot was excellent for seeing from a distance whether a cow or a calf was in trouble.
The truck engine roared as we bounced over the ruts. There were cattle here and there, some were milling nervously in the distance, some appeared oblivious. The animals seemed to be bunched toward the northern part of the giant pasture. On one of the turns, the headlights swept over a large black shadow standing in the southeastern tree line of the field. It was only a fleeting glimpse of what looked like a large cow, standing in the shadow beneath a large tree at the edge of the field, but far away from the rest of the herd.
“Must be in trouble,” Tom grunted, as he swung the truck away from the main herd and headed south. The perimeter was about eighty yards away when the bouncing headlights suddenly picked up two large orbs of yellow light staring fixedly from the same large tree. “Did you see that?” two of us said in unison. Tom gunned the engine and, as the headlights danced crazily in front of us, we could now clearly see that the reflected yellow light came from the eyes of a huge animal probably twenty feet off the ground, perched in the tree.
“I’m not going to let him get another calf,” Tom snarled as he suddenly ground the truck to a halt and reached behind for his rifle. We were no more than fifty yards from the large creature that lay motionless, almost casually, in the tree. The only indication of the beast’s presence was the penetrating yellow light of the unblinking eyes as they stared fixedly back into the light.
This is unusual behavior, I thought as Tom steadied the rifle on the open door of the truck. Shouldn’t it be running away? The rifle’s sharp report rang out, and instantly, like a light being snapped off, the eyes disappeared.
“Got him,” yelled Tom triumphantly. “I saw him fall to the ground.” We scrambled back into the truck and Tom stopped about forty feet from the tree. There was no sign of the large creature under or near the tree. We split up and searched for any sight or sound of the wounded or dead beast. Thirty yards to my left Gorman suddenly yelled, “I see him.” The shout was quickly followed by two loud reports from his rifle. “Got him at point blank,” Gorman yelled as we jumped excitedly over the fence into the thick undergrowth. The snow crunched loudly underfoot as we stumbled around looking for some sign of it.
We were cautious because a large, wounded animal was especially dangerous at night.
I was still carrying my video camera as we warily looked all around, half expecting something to spring at us from the darkness. But there was utter silence.
“He jumped back here when I hit him,” Tom said as he scratched his head in puzzlement. “I was no more than forty feet away. Where’d he go? That sucker must have weighed four hundred pounds.”
We began quartering the area, looking at the snow for tracks. Something that big should have left an obvious trail in the snow and there should have been blood. It was then that I saw it—a single, obvious oval track about six inches in diameter embedded deeply in the patch of snow. I yelled at the other two, who came running. I shone the flashlight, and there it was. It looked unusual: a single large print in the snow with two sharp claws protruding from the rear of the mark going a couple of inches deeper. It almost looked like a bird of prey, maybe a raptor print, but huge and, from the depth of the print, from a very heavy creature. I began videotaping, as the physicist unsteadily held the flashlight while looking over his shoulder, waiting for a large wounded animal to charge us.
Minutes ticked by as we searched in vain for a companion print. We found another one in an area of unmelted snow about twenty feet from the first, but nothing else. We listened carefully for any movement in the undergrowth as we searched. There was an eerie silence in the area, broken only by the distant bellowing of the cows over on the other side of the pasture. They were still deeply disturbed by the commotion we had generated and were not coming over to investigate.
Almost two hours later, we gave up, exhausted, cold, and still slightly jangled from the brief burst of adrenaline. Again there was an unspoken shudder at the idea of sleeping in the trailer a mere hundred yards from where the bizarre creature or creatures had apparently vanished into thin air, having been shot with a high-powered rifle. It was time to call an end to another busy day on the Skinwalker Ranch.
The next day we compared notes and debriefed Tom on what had happened. He swore that there had been two large animals, one in the tree and the other on the ground. He also swore that he had hit both animals, the first with a single bullet, the second with two bullets. Tom was an expert marksman, able to kill a coyote at five hundred yards, and he had shot both of these large animals at close range. He described the second animal that crouched in the undergrowth as huge, heavily muscled, and looking like a four-hundred-pound wild dog. The animal had been staring at him and had tensed just before springing when Tom had shot it twice from no more than forty feet. Yet no signs of blood and two confusing distant single tracks in the snow added to, rather than solved, the mystery.
The incidents of March 10-12, 1997, were very difficult to explain. They were certainly verification of unusual or anomalous activity, but did they fit the criteria that NIDS was looking for? Those criteria initially had been defined as the verification of events first described by Gorman, the witnessing of unidentified flying objects by the scientists, and their capture on camera or video images. The bizarre killing of the calf and the potentially deadly night time encounter with phantom creatures that were shot but left no blood and few tracks did not appear to fulfill the criteria of anything that could be reported at a scientific meeting. Nor could this kind of incident be written up for a peer-reviewed science journal. In fact, beyond the videotaped track in the snow, there was no physical evidence that this incident had ever happened. And at a subsequent Science Advisory Board meeting, the board made it abundantly clear that these events, in the absence of physical evidence, did not constitute verification of anything.[huh, interesting that many the next day did see DC]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Lights
Little did we know that these unexpected events would become part of an increasingly frustrating pattern of transient, difficult-to-interpret, but frightening events and phenomena that would never again be repeated in our presence.
next
PART 4
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2021/01/part-4-hunt-for-skinwalkerthe.html
The Bulls
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