Cattle Mutilation Mystery?

 America's newspaper of record has gotten strangely credulous, in recent years, when it comes to the realm of the quasi-paranormal. There was the Times's long series of articles for instance—starting a few years back—about the UFO phenomenon, which ended up being sourced largely to a single eccentric with tenuous ties to the defense community. (There could perhaps be neutral and objective journalistic coverage of reports of unidentified objects on radar scanners, etc., that did not try to push a New Age agenda, but the Times coverage was not it—the pieces were littered with subtle giveaways that we were in the hands of true believers, as I discussed in an earlier post.)

Now, the Times is back on a similar beat with breathless coverage of an alleged rash of cattle mutilations. While the paper cannot be accused of misrepresenting anything, it does its best to artificially heighten a sense of mystery and alarm about these events. There was "no evidence of a struggle, footprints or tire tracks" around the animals' corpses. The reporter quotes officials who make much of the seemingly "precise," surgical way in which parts of the animals appear to have been removed, as if by the blade of a knife. Then there's the macabre details of the specific parts that were mutilated: the animals were found with their hides intact, but their tongues, jaws, anus, and genitals all seemingly carved away. 

The reporter notes that this is hardly the first time the nation has been seized with a rash of tales about "mysterious" cattle mutilations: a similar collective panic occurred in 1975. The reports then were eerily similar to the ones today. There was the same lack of signs of any human presence or deliberate killing of the cattle; the surgical precision of the cuts in the animals' flesh; the same lack of blood around the wounds; and the same focus on tongues, lips, and genitals. At the time, popular paranormal literature suggested the mutilations might be the work of aliens in UFOs. Today, officials apparently suggest, according to the Times, "that a helicopter might have been used in the middle of the night."

What the Times piece does not mention, however, is that not only have we been down this road before (in terms of these same sort of accounts coming in waves from ranches around the country), but that in the past, the panic over the mutilations ultimately subsided for the simple reason that they actually required no nefarious or supernatural explanation. Scientists eventually concluded that the cattle had died of natural causes (explaining the lack of any sign of human presence or struggle). They had begun to decompose (hence the dryness and lack of blood). And small natural predators—unable to pierce the thick parts of the animals' hides—had chewed away the exposed soft parts of the carcasses they could reach. 

It's all described in a 1977 piece from the Skeptical Inquirer, and it makes perfect sense. Ranches are large and sprawling enough places that cattle—some of whom will die regularly in the natural course of events—could lie exposed to the elements for days without being found. Animal predation and scavenging can often create nearly surgical incisions in desiccated corpses. These small predators are often nocturnal, so they wouldn't be glimpsed by day. And these animals tend to eat the relatively soft and exposed parts of dead animals first (sorry to get gruesome in this post, but the topic demands it)—hence the fact that the tongue, lips, anus, and genitals of the animals had all been seemingly "removed." 

No aliens or helicopters or satanic cults necessary to explain it, then. The "cattle mutilations" may be the product of nothing more than, say, coyotes. 

The question becomes, though—if this is all true, and these cattle deaths are nothing unusual—then why are ranchers only reporting them now? Presumably ranchers have firsthand familiarity with the naturally-occurring deaths of their livestock. Wouldn't they know what a partially-decomposed carcass of an animal looks like? Why would they suddenly be identifying these familiar phenomena as mysterious? 

Well, the SI piece has an answer to that too. The sudden apprehension of everyday occurrences as strange and dangerous is familiar to the literature of social psychology—the Skeptical Inquirer cites the example of the Seattle "windshield pitting" epidemic, when people suddenly started noticing the tiny scuffs and nicks in their windshields, once they went looking for them, and concluded that they must be related to fallout from H-bomb testing in the Western states. 

If we accept this explanation in turn, then the question becomes: okay, but why is it happening now? Why does this social phenomenon of collective panic, in which people suddenly perceive the mundane world around them in a new and more frightening way, occur in waves—in this case, two episodes of the same panic occurring roughly fifty years apart, yet taking a remarkably similar form? 

One can suggest some admittedly vague and nebulous similarities between the psychological profile of 1975 and our present era in order to account for it. There is, in both, a similar sense of paranoia. 

In our present day, we lived through a global pandemic, an attempted coup, and now the rise of AI—all contributing to a strange feeling that hypotheses and phenomena once confined to dystopian science fiction or alternative history can actually happen in the real world. We are thus experiencing a profound distortion in our sense of shared reality, contributing to conspiracy theories and a newfound openness—even on the part of reputable legacy institutions and trusted repositories of consensus reality—such as the New York Times—to discussing the frankly weird. 

1975 similarly is recalled as an age of paranoia: a time of government coverups and conspiracies, a sense of national defeat and malaise, an age of societal breakdown, in which people were ready to believe in the bizarre and the macabre, particularly if it could be attributed to satanic hippie death cults (the memory of the Manson murders being still fresh in people's minds, as the SI piece points out). It's the mood captured indelibly in a novel from the era, Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers: a novel in which former hippie idealists have become cynical drug runners, and a former revolutionary Trotskyist now sells tabloid magazines pushing depraved bogus stories of sex and violence, passing them off as true. 

In both 1975 and today, then, we were living through an era of particularly heightened "American magic and dread" (to borrow an apt phrase from Don DeLillo's White Noise which I've used in this context before). These are both eras in which our sense of shared reality appears to have been ruptured, inviting in speculative thought and a new fascination with the mysterious and uncanny. (As Ezra Klein put it in the headline of a piece last summer: "This is a weirder moment than you think," citing UFO reports, debates over the possible sentience of new AI language models, etc.) 

In 2023, it has taken the form of a wave of renewed interest in UFOs and collective paranoia over aerial phenomena. These were prompted by an extreme collective and governmental overreaction to a Chinese spy balloon, which led the media and U.S. military to panic over and even shoot down a series of more innocuous balloons that appeared in U.S. skies back in February. 

These weird events were another classic example—up there with the Seattle windshield pitting affair—of the public seizing upon familiar and ordinary phenomena (weather balloons or hobbyist balloons in the sky) and giving them a darker interpretation in an atmosphere of collective social paranoia and Cold War tensions. The public conversation around these balloons, recall, quickly took on a Fortean character, moving from the mundane to the paranormal ("maybe we're fished for by supercelestial beings," to quote a character in William Gaddis's novel, The Recognitions, referring to Fort's accounts of mysterious airships that appeared to be dragging anchors intended to ensnare terrestrial observers.) 

And it makes sense that, following this UFO flap, we now have a renewed rash of interest in cattle mutilations. History repeats itself: the first time as... well, here, both times appear to be farce. 

But we also don't need to look to these vaguer emotional resonances to make the case that the mid-1970s parallel our present. We can also bring this down to brass tacks. The Skeptical Inquirer piece from 1977, after all, offers one tantalizing clue about the underlying economic reasons why anxieties were running high among ranchers during the time of the first "cattle mutilation" scare. It was a time, the author notes, of extravagantly high prices for meat. Far from this representing a windfall for ranchers, however, it reflected the extent to which they were being affected in turn by rampant price increases for cattle feed. In short, they were being squeezed by rising food prices too, and their margins were disappearing. 

Here then, is yet a further sense in which the mid-1970s resembles our present: both were times of rampant inflation. Theirs was of course worse than our own, reaching double digits. And yet, the inflation of our own time has been especially severe in the area of food prices, after Putin's invasion of Ukraine sent grain prices skyrocketing globally. It makes sense, therefore, that ranchers might be living through a moment of heightened anxiety and pressure, and therefore inclined to look twice at otherwise ordinary phenomena, and suddenly read a sinister intention and occult mystery into the natural effects of decomposition and predation on animal carcasses. 

It's interesting to note in this regard that other episodes of mass social panic in history have also been sparked by rising food prices and fears of scarcity. The "Great Fear" of rural France during the French Revolution, for instance—extensively documented by French social historians and summarized in essays by Robert Darnton and others—began with rising grain prices, which contributed to rumors and panic about a supposed deliberate plan to starve the peasantry. 

If we want to get truly quasi-Marxist about it, therefore, could we speculate that the deeper structural causes of episodes of mass paranoia and collective panic always have something to do with the scarcity of food? Perhaps one of the deepest human needs is hunger, and therefore one of our deepest fears is being denied the basic nourishment we need to survive, and thus, when food is getting more expensive and harder to come by, we are particularly vulnerable to believing rumors that read a sinister plot into our mundane experience and prompt us to project our worst fears onto mysterious "others."

It's hard to escape the fact, after all—speaking of "others"—that the recent resurgence of interest in 1970s-style paranormal speculation—UFOs, cattle mutilations, etc. (surely crop circles will be next)—coincides with a renewed spike in Cold War tensions. Oftentimes, the two have overlapped, as we have seen above. The actual Chinese spy balloon quickly became conflated with U.S. Defense Department reports of unidentified aerial phenomena, leading to a rash of anxiety about potential foreign and/or extraterrestrial invaders descending upon us from the skies—an episode of "xenophobia"—fear of aliens—in multiple senses of the word!

And, even more to our point, politicians with an innate sense of the zeitgeist of collective mass psychosis have even found a way to demagogue these fears of Chinese spy balloons and UFOs by tying them to the nation's agricultural anxieties. Over the past year, state houses around the country have entertained bills—often with bipartisan support—that seek to restrict land sales to nonresident Chinese buyers. These mean-spirited laws—which bear an unmistakable family resemblance to the bigoted "alien land laws" of the early twentieth century—have been defended by playing on collective panic over both the aerial phenomena flap and escalating food prices. Politicians have invoked the specter of Chinese buyers seizing control of the U.S. food supply, for instance, or of purchasing land near U.S. military installations in order to use it to launch more spy balloons. 

These preposterous arguments—which reflect no actual significant increase in nonresident foreign purchases of U.S. agricultural land or any genuine national security concerns which cannot be addressed more effectively and rationally by nondiscriminatory means—nonetheless are a masterwork in the dark art of demagoguery. They manage to combine a host of interlocking fears that—as we have seen—for some mysterious reason coincide with one another on a subconscious level. The collective American paranoid id links fears of rising food prices, extraterritorial "alien" invaders, and earthbound "alien" foreign antagonists; and the bans on nonresident Chinese land sales manage to combine all of these diffuse ingredients all into one all-embracing paranoid stew. 

But if I'm correct in making these connections, then it suggests that the New York Times writing in a way that pushes these same subconscious buttons and stokes these same irrational fears is far from innocuous fun. The paper has an obligation to report critically and scientifically on what's actually happening to cattle (which, it turns out, is nothing out of the ordinary). Otherwise, the fears they inspire of otherworldly outsiders can feed into all-too-consequential fears, xenophobia, and antagonism toward this-worldly "others," with ghastly results.