Bless the beasts and children

"We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight." - HP Lovecraft

For a while there, back in the 1980s, some extremely High and Outside news began intruding into mainstream consciousness: Satanic Ritual Abuse, crop circles, alien abduction and cattle mutilation became newsworthy. If permitted to continue as subjects for serious inquiry, consensus reality might have begun to groan under its contradictions, and for some there would have been Hell to pay.

It wasn't hard to spin the story - actually, spin the public - that there was nothing to see, and that those who saw something were fools or charlatans. Most people were happy to accept any explanation to not take the reports seriously. What they most wanted to hear was the reassurance that the weirdness was "debunked," and the world really was as normal as their own experience of it.

So the "False Memory Foundation" was born in 1992, declaring a "syndrome" where one didn't exist, in order to lay to rest "Satanic Panic." Nevermind that nearly half of the declassified files obtained by John Marks, author of The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, documented CIA interest in the occult, nor that the Foundation's Board was composed of scientists whom the CIA had contracted to conduct mind control research.

And so, "Doug and Dave" appeared in 1991, claiming they had made all the crop circles in southern England since 1978, some 2,000, with planks and string. Though they were unable to recreate them for the media, or produce the anomalies associated with genuine circles, it didn't matter: To most people who had lifted their eyes for a moment out of the ordinary, they'd seen what they needed to stop paying attention: all circles had been debunked, because two pub crawlers had fessed up. Nevermind that their story was traced "to a company in Somerset that carries out research on top secret military projects."

Alien abduction, typically of UFO material, was made to disappear in plain sight by being absorbed into the Military-Entertainment Complex. It was "X-Files stuff," and so not a serious subject. Accounts were ascribed to the faulty memories of hysterics. Nevermind that not all memories were "recovered," and not all victims hysterical. And nevermind the existence of credible, independent witnesses, physical evidence and corroborating phenomenon.

Not much effort was devoted to debunking cattle mutilation. The rural setting of the crimes made it easy to convince sophisticated city-dwellers - who never see a living cow let alone one mutilated - that it was all the work of natural predators, copycat punks or disease. Nevermind that ranchers knew better, nor that it never went away.

Two weeks ago, Ray Riguidel found the mutilated carcass of a 10-year old cow in his pasture. One eye, one ear, its udder and sex organs were missing. There were no tracks or footprints. There was no blood.

"I’ve heard about it before, but it never really sunk in," Riguidel said."But it’s sunk in now. It’s real."

George Larre, who lost a cow to a similar mutilation five years before, added "If you haven’t seen it, I wouldn’t expect anyone to believe it. But if you really see one for yourself, and you understand what coyotes will do, you know it’s not predators. Some people say it’s from up above, and I don’t know. I’m not going to say it is or it isn’t. But when you see absolutely no clues and no reason, you really have to wonder."

A friend recommended that Riguidel call Fernand Belzil, a plain-speaking local rancher who has been investigating mutilations for eight years and makes modest claims for his findings. His interest in the phenomenon "snowballed" after visiting his first mutilation site, "and it’s been one hell of a deal ever since. It kind of just opened up a can of worms." Belzil doesn't presume to know what's going on. As for UFOs, he says "I guess I believe...but I’d sure like to see one first. We’re naïve to believe we’re alone in this universe, but I guess that’s just my opinion."

Fernand Belzil


Some samples of Belzil's research, drawn from his website:

June 6, 1999, near St Paul, Alberta
As you will see by the picture, half the nose area was cut out, one eye lid was removed, another one inch deep cut about an inch long just below the left eye. The penis & scrotum were removed. The oval cut on the stomach was 16 by 12 inches and it looked like a surgical cut. The flesh where it had been skinned showed no signs of teeth marks or any other abnormality.... The rectum area was cut out in a triangle shape.... There was no blood anywhere.

June 15, 2002, Veteran, Alberta
A beef Hereford cow was found mutilated in a clump of trees lying on her back with the 4 legs sticking upward. I only have 2 other cases that were found on their back. This is a very strange case. The branches of the trees above her were broken. It appears to have been dropped there. The tongue was removed, the flesh on the jaws neatly incised, ear and eye also removed, and no blood. Notice the surgical incision of the neck area.

May 15, 2003, near Derwent, Alberta
I was called out to a farm about 35 miles south of St Paul, near a town called Derwent. There I was shown a 2-day-old male lamb that had been mutilated. It was found inside a corral that had a solid board, 4 foot high fence surrounding it to keep out predators.... There was a perfectly round incision found between the hind legs in the udder area, no teeth marks and no sign that a knife had been used. There were no burn marks on the skin in that area. See Picture #1. The rectum was cut out, at the lower part of the rectum incision the tail had a neat V-shape cut (under part of the tail) that went back about 2 inches. Very odd. See Picture #2. The intestines were taken out through the rectum and piled a foot and a half behind the lamb. Seen on Picture #3. Both eyes had been removed, the lower jaw had been broken and the right side of the skull appeared smashed.

Theories, as they usually do, abound, and generally conform to investigators' other presumptions.

Linda Moulton Howe has been studying cattle mutilations for nearly a quarter century. In 1980, before it became unthinkable to do so, and after Governor Richard Lamm of Colorado declared mutilations to be "one of the greatest outrages in the history of the western cattle industry," adding "it is no longer possible to blame predators for the mutilations," CBS aired her investigative documentary Strange Harvest. Howe's belief is that bovine tissue's similarity to that of humans offer aliens a means to relatively benignly sample the effects of environmental pollutants. (Howe has the courage to examine disreputable subjects, but too often I find her conclusions distressingly credulous.)

Budd Hopkins believes cow eggs are being harvested to serve as hosts for transgenic alien-human cloning. That much more than eggs are taken, that his advanced extraterrestrials should be expected to have developed a less wasteful and attention-getting methodology, and that more than cows are mutilated (as above, in Belzil's account of a two-day old lamb), don't seem to enter into his calculations, because he's already weighted the equation to come out "extraterrestrial."

My presumption, as usual, is towards an occult explanation. (Remember the calf mutilation associated with the murder of Father Alfred Kunz, who was exposing ritualized pedophilia in Wisonsin's Catholic Church, and the canine sacrifices of the Process Church.) Which isn't to say it's always wholly human. Because the phenomenon appears to fall in a grey zone of significant convergence of both human cultic practice and UFO activity.

Perception of what's going on would undoubtedly shift if the cattle were cats, and the ranches city blocks. Sometimes they are, as in this 1995 account from Kelowna, BC, which begins with a woman looking out her kitchen window and seeing "two brilliant lit cigar shaped objects moving slowly over the apple trees, at about thirty or forty feet of height":

As they scoured the area the objects bathed the orchard in blue light and in the woman's words "seemed to be looking for something". The craft then began to slowly move from the back of the orchard and headed in the direction of the house. They now stopped directly next to the house over a garage addition and shone down white beams of light. Even stranger, the witness described the lights as broken up, "like a white line down the highway".

It is here where high strangeness enters the picture. The woman said that in retrospect a thought that passed through her mind during the sightings was her concern for the cats.

Neighbourhood cats would often congregate in the garage and this was now where the lights were "searching". The objects then "turned off" and left. The next day over a dozen cats in this area of Kelowna were missing and were never seen again.

Last fall our hotline received a call from a fellow in Burnaby who said that he witnessed, along with his brother, a dark shadowy figure run in front of them as they stood in the driveway of their home one rainy night. More disturbing, all three of his cats were gone. Oddly enough, the man said he witnessed the same dark figure as a young boy not far from the area. At that time the shadowy-shape ran into a bush.

The Kamloops area of BC was also privy to a rash of half cat mutilations as well, with a dozen or so cats mysteriously cut up. Same show, no blood, no muss, no apparent fuss and again, never a sign of struggle, no fur strewn about and no spilled blood.

Someone is doing something with our cats. Since the early nineties UFOBC has been aware of the "Half Cat" mystery on the Lower Mainland. At this time the mutilated cats first showed up in Vancouver's West Side. In these instances cats had been sliced in half with great precision and then somehow drained of their blood (exsanguination). Never a drop to be found, with no stains at all on the remaining feline carcass (in these cases, half carcasses).

In the Surrey area last fall half cats started showing up again. I talked to two woman who were unfortunately "victims of the circumstance". Living about three or four miles apart, both woman found their own cats' remains. In the first case one of the woman was off to do some banking, oddly enough she said that morning she took the long way to the bank, and to her shock found her dead cat. It was placed to appear to be coming out of a manhole cover in the middle of the road. The woman pulled over and saw that it was her own cat cut in half. Like other cases the other half was nowhere to be found . As is the way, the culprit seemed to want his work to be noticed. The other unfortunate young woman found her cat in the alley behind her house. Devoid of all blood, showing no signs of struggle and once again cut in half. Perfectly! The SPCA is sticking to their guns that these are coyote attacks. Out of ignorance or in order to quell any panic, I don't know but that's their story and they're sticking to it!

It was with great surprise when I fell upon a similar story of half cats in upstate New York in a town called Lee which is close to the Hudson Valley. However, the "coupe de grace" came when I was thumbing through an old Fate Magazine recently and discovered that the Half Cats have also surfaced in Gulf Breeze (Florida), Plano (Texas), Fall's Church (Virginia) and St Louis (Missouri). In Fall's Church twenty cases were reported alone, with slightly less than that number showing up in St Louis.

No one is suggesting aliens are experimenting on cats. In an urban environment, upon house pets, the cultic aspect of the phenomenon comes into sharper focus. Yet here, too, we have a UFO associated with the event. (And it gets worse, even for cat lovers, as there are cases of human mutilations which match the pattern. See here, though be warned, the images are graphic.)

So perhaps, instead of mutilations for a scientific purpose these are ritual killings, perhaps for the magick of the blood sacrifice or simply the induction of terror into the world. Regardless, the reason for the killing is the killing. Certainly the thought of cultists in cahoots with their bloodthirsty gods is not as comforting a hypothesis as aliens studying tissue samples to gauge environmental pollutants, but to me it's the explanation which makes best, unfortunate sense of the evidence. That it's a strange explanation is of no account, because whatever the explanation, it must be a strange one.

Jacques Vallee writes in Messengers of Deception that "the symbols attached to the UFO phenomenon are the primary images of life: blood, death, sex, time, space and sky":

What are the organs taken by the mutilators? The eyes, the ears, the tongue and the genitals: that is, the organs concerned with communication and reproduction. The culprits deserve credit not only as good surgeons, but also as good psychologists.

Should we note the common feature of cored rectums, and that according to Aleister Crowley, the anus denotes the Eye of Horus? Should we be thinking, sacrifice?

Something's hungry, and it's not a coyote.