by professorpan » Fri May 26, 2006 11:40 am
Theories on Recent Cattle Mutilations Sort of Alien<br><br>The tales of mysterious livestock mutilations go way back on the<br>Colorado flatlands, back at least to 1967 outside of Alamosa, where<br>Snippy the horse died a strange death.<br><br>Snippy had been skinned in a bizarre way. The cuts were sharp and<br>precise. There was no blood at the scene. Snippy's owner said when<br>she touched the horse's flesh, it oozed green fluid that burned her<br>skin.<br><br>There were, of course, reports of UFOs in the area that night.<br><br>Beam ahead, so to speak, to Monday. To the parched land near this<br>tiny town just 40 miles from the Kansas border. Chuck Bowen, 54, a<br>rancher and a photographer, gazes across the 13,000 acres his family<br>has owned since the 1940s. He takes a step, and the dust around his<br>boots swirls in the relentless wind.<br><br>Two of his cows have died freaky deaths. And then he hears the word<br>"alien," and he smiles. It's hard, frankly, for down-to-earth Bowen<br>to imagine why extraterrestrial beings would hover over his remote<br>meadow, carefully snatch away the faces of two cows and then dart<br>back into the twinkling stars.<br><br>"You would think," he said, "they'd have something more important to<br>do."<br><br>And yet Bowen wonders what on earth could have killed his Angus cows<br>and surgically removed the skin from the same side of both cows'<br>faces, leaving the carcasses otherwise intact in the undisturbed<br>grass of the sprawling ranch.<br><br>"The grass around their legs was still upright, still tall," he<br>said. "When an animal dies it usually thrashes around and disturbs<br>the ground. This was like the cows had been gently laid down in the<br>grass. Like they'd been lowered."<br><br>Oh, and there's this little tidbit that jacks up the spooky meter<br>another notch in Bowen's head: The ranch, originally owned by his<br>grandfather, sits on the site of the infamous Nov. 29, 1864, Sand<br>Creek Massacre, in which some 200 Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians were<br>killed by U.S. Army soldiers. Bowen and his wife, Sheri, have spent<br>decades sifting through the dirt, uncovering about 3,000 artifacts of<br>that horrible day. Everything from cannonball fragments to metal<br>arrowheads to soldiers' uniform buttons.<br><br>In February and again in April, not far from that main battlefield<br>and down by the towering cottonwood trees that stood even back then,<br>Bowen found the dead cows.<br><br>"Both of them had the skin sliced off the left side of their faces<br>in exactly the same pattern,"<br>he said.<br><br>"The cut was a perfectly straight line," Sheri Bowen said. "You<br>could tell it was done with a knife."<br><br>Ahead of a thunderstorm on Monday, the noon sun pushed the<br>thermometer past 85 degrees and the foul odor of a cow carcass danced<br>in the air. Lying on the ground amid a colony of prairie dogs was the<br>body of one of the Bowens' cows. This one went down, as best Chuck<br>can figure, about April 1. Its black hide was weathered, but the<br>precise slicing of the skin around its jaw and snout was plain to see.<br><br>Kiowa County Sheriff Forest Frazee and deputies examined both<br>carcasses. Frazee said a veterinarian told him an eagle might have<br>sliced the skin from the cows' faces. And that the brittle winter<br>grass around the bodies had not been stepped on.<br><br>"That grass breaks. It's easy to see a footprint. No one came<br>anywhere near those cows," Frazee said. "So I don't really know what<br>happened. I do know that I don't believe in the boogeyman."<br><br>The Bowens - seemingly about as regular and ordinary as people can<br>be - live about 30 miles south, in Lamar. They run about 90 cows on<br>the family land, and the two deaths have left them rattled.<br><br>"Coyotes wouldn't go anywhere near the carcasses for weeks and<br>weeks," Sheri Bowen said. "They just left them alone. And Chuck's<br>metal detector, the one we use to find artifacts, it gave a reading<br>of foil over the entire body. Aluminum foil.<br><br>"I've heard all the stories, but I have a little trouble with the<br>alien thing. Aliens killing our cattle just doesn't make any sense."<br><br>Chuck shakes his head.<br><br>"Both cows had the exact same patch of skin taken from the same side<br>of their face," he said. "And to be honest, it's a little creepy."<br><br>Source: The Denver Post<br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.denverpost.com/ci_3857439?source=rss">www.denverpost.com/ci_3857439?source=rss</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--> <p></p><i></i>