Livestock and the beginnings of the Satanic Panic

NOTE: While I have made an effort to use as inoffensive language as possible, this post contains subject matter and imagery which some may find disturbing.

In my last post, I discussed the origins of the notion that livestock mutilations were caused by aliens who, apparently, really hated farm animals. Near the end I mentioned that aliens were not, in fact, the only proposed resolution for unexplained animal deaths. In keeping with the spirit of Halloween, I’ll be delving into a couple of those alternate hypotheses here.

This was not much of a surprise to many. During that era, Satanism was the go-to scapegoat for many of the ills of the world, from ritual child abuse, to murders, to drug use, and to the aforementioned cattle mutilation. There were also alleged to be a great many gateways into the Satanic lifestyle, including (but not limited to) playing Dungeons and Dragons, playing video games, and listening to heavy metal music. (As someone who did all three, I can personally attest that the closest I ever came to mutilating a cow was sloppily eating a cheeseburger.)

Odd though aliens and devil worshippers may seem, there was at least one other rather extraordinary interpretation of the evidence. Frederick W. Smith, in his book Cattle Mutilation: The Unthinkable Truth, proposed a rather unique and bizarre amalgamation of those two supposed explanations. Not right away, mind you. The book takes a long and circuitous route to get to the point promised by the title, including a rather staggering amount of redundancy, with phrases and ideas repeated ad nauseum. Even then the book measures in at well under 100 pages and makes for little more than an entertaining afternoon’s diversion. The vast majority of Smith’s book amounts to cautions against brainwashing, claims that the government and other vague powers were suppressing the truth, and assertions that science was unreliable and on the verge of crashing-and-burning in rather spectacular fashion.

Smith also strongly implies that the alien hypothesis was a widely accepted scientific view of the phenomenon, which he then points to as evidence that the scientific community may not be reliable. His primary criticism of science revealed a fundamental misunderstanding of the scientific method. Throughout the book he repeatedly conflates methodological naturalism with materialism. While those two things certainly have some overlap, they are not nearly as interchangeable as Smith seems to think they are.

Smith also casts aspersions on the reliability of the press, suggesting a conspiracy between the government (or other authorities) and the press to suppress and hide information from the public, allegedly to deter more mutilations by denying the actors publicity for their crimes.

“Something might also be said here about publicity. The policy of those trying to direct and control public information on this subject is to play everything down, and insofar as possible suppress public interest and awareness of what’s actually happening. The media has been told to cool it, not to carry the news even though there’s an intense public interest in developments. The reasoning behind this, ostensibly, is that mutilators want publicity. By cutting off public exposure, the primary cause of mutilations, they’ll stop.”

(This claim is severely undermined by the vast number of newspaper articles in our clippings files, and on the Colorado Historic Newspaper Collection site regarding the acts.) 

“The most obviously crazy stuff, however, that gets the most media coverage, comes largely or perhaps entirely from government plants and agents that are coached and financed for no other purpose than to give the whole subject a black eye and make it appear stupid and insane.”

If you’re even slightly observant, you may have noticed that Smith makes quite a few assertions about who is involved in disseminating information, and what their motives are, and the answer to your question is no, he never does provide any evidence for those assertions. It gets even worse, and much, much weirder. Smith believes wholeheartedly that UFO sightings and animal slaughter are indeed connected, but he doesn’t believe that the culprits are extraterrestrials per se. In fact, he asserts that these beings have been constantly monitoring humanity since before the dawn of civilization.  

As to why they mutilate animals? Well, that’s only actually delved into in the last few pages of Smith’s book, and is best represented by his own words:

“...What they’re really interested in is reproduction, not of cattle, but of humans. They’re looking intently to see how far down the tube we are. That will tell them how long they may have to be here. They don’t really know that, but by this broad sampling of animal tissue they’ll be more able to make an educated guess.

”Out of respect for the human form, God’s image, they’d never dissect human bodies no matter how much might be learned from that. They observe a cosmic rule against dissecting the human form. Also that isn’t necessary, since they can discover what they want to know from an analysis of animal tissues.”

(See what I meant about redundancy?)

Why reproduction? To answer that question, we need to delve a bit deeper into the mutilations themselves. One of the reasons people inferred correlations among the disparate animals was that they contained some similarities, which suggested a pattern. In many cases, external organs were noticed to be missing, including ears, lips and, in a not insignificant number of instances, male genitalia. In a lower proportion of instances, internal organs were also reported missing, and that included female reproductive organs as well. 

One other ‘mystery’ which was often pointed to was the fact that there was no blood found at the majority of the scenes. What was frequently overlooked is that, also in the majority of cases, the animals were deceased prior to any disfigurement taking place. The most likely reason no blood was found at the scene is because, despite what Hollywood may portray, wounds bleed very little once the heart is no longer beating.