The Phantom Scalpel
"Patterns of animal mutilations are consistent with a covert infectious disease monitoring operation in the United States and elsewhere."
Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of cattle mutilations and potentially disturbing connections to prion disease.
One of the most enigmatic aspects of UFO lore is the instances of cattle mutilations that have been reported by ranchers all over the United States for decades. Due to the seemingly high level of strangeness surrounding these often gruesome events, research into these cases exposes a more sinister aspect of the phenomenon.
Unsurprisingly, leading theories in the field of ufology posit an extraterrestrial (ET) source as the most likely explanation for the surgical-like precision, often culminating in the removal of very specific anatomical parts (tongue, eyes, reproductive organs, etc.). Another persistent theme throughout these tales is the non-existent evidence of human or animal presence at these sites that may otherwise provide clues to help identify the perpetrators. Most disturbingly, the carcasses are regularly and completely drained of blood without any sign of the body fluid at the scene.
Unidentified anomalous phenomena are often reported to be in the vicinity of these incidents, leading to the hypothesis that a race of alien visitors is to blame. The theory goes on to surmise the ET motivations behind mutilations are just another aspect of the genetic experimentation commonly reported by abductees. The idea is that the similarity of the bovine genome to the human one may provide a more covert way to study our own without alarming the public, or that this may indicate interest in our food supply.
There is a scale of additional theories that range from the prosaic, such as criminal acts, to even more mythical origins like the fabled "goat sucker" known as Chupacabra. But one highly educated and seasoned expert in the field of paranormal phenomena, who also happens to be a veteran molecular biologist, suggests at least some of these explanations may not be mutually exclusive.
Bidirectional Mimicry
The most legendary area in the country when it comes to the frequency and intensity of high strangeness is likely Skinwalker Ranch, located in Utah's Uintah basin. This geographical hotspot of the supernatural maintains a long history of alleged UFO, cryptid, and poltergeist activity. Purchased by billionaire Robert Bigelow in 1996 from owners Terry and Gwen Sherman, the family's vivid experiences with unexplained phenomena signaled a rich environment conducive to scientific research into the paranormal.
Bigelow also founded the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), a research organization consisting of numerous scientists dedicated to solving these odd mysteries that nobody else in academia would touch. The UFO issue and other electromagnetic factors were investigated by physicists like Dr. Eric Davis and Dr. Hal Puthoff, while other more abstract occurrences interested individuals like non-lethal weapons and remote viewing expert Col. John Alexander.
Cattle mutilations, of course, were also studied, and the man in charge of these inquiries was Dr. Colm Kelleher. With a Ph.D. in biochemistry, Dr. Kelleher was more than qualified to conduct rigorous scientific analysis on these bizarre attacks that left no traces of blood or struggle. Known for co-authoring Hunt for the Skinwalker with journalist George Knapp, a book that details his time at the ranch with the NIDS team, Dr. Kelleher visited numerous locations where cattle had been robbed of their organs and left to decompose while exhibiting a plethora of anomalous biomarkers.
Dr. Kelleher, in a presentation at the 2023 Archives of the Impossible conference at Rice University, provided some insight into his most recent understanding of the cattle mutilation dynamic. He posits that there are at least two sources at the core of this phenomenon.
The first source is the intelligence behind the anomalous craft that often appears around the same time and place as the occurrence. Most would interpret this as an overlay of the ET hypothesis onto these events.
The second source is the much more prosaic idea that humans are behind them. He spoke of a conversation he had with Col. Barry Hennessy of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI). Dr. Kelleher explained the levels of deception AFOSI is willing to go to by masking classified aircraft prototypes with fabricated UFO stories for the protection of advanced technologies within special access programs.
Col. Hennessy also mentioned several Air Force bases that were plagued by UFO activity during the 1970s and 1980s. He admitted that a lot of these incursions were due to our own penetration testing, but at the same time acknowledged that around 50% of the craft detected were of truly unknown origin.
There was an obvious distinction between the flight characteristics, shapes, and sizes of the seemingly non-human craft with the aircraft originating inside Air Force SAP research and development operations. But over time, it became clear that even though these observables could be distinguished from each other, the behavior of the two were eerily similar.
The similarities in the behavior of these UFOs that Dr. Kelleher described required him to envision a new, more nuanced hypothesis that he calls "bi-directional mimicry." He posits that both the ufonauts and human military operations use the actions of the other for deceptive purposes. It is in this context that we now arrive at our main subject of cattle mutilations, and how this theory of bi-directional mimicry may be applied.
First, we must address some of the issues brought up by those who disbelieve that such a precise surgical extraction of organs, some of which even appear to be the result of laser cutting, can be performed by humans without leaving a trace of blood or any sign of their presence at the site.
These would certainly require the perpetrators to possess advanced technology and knowledge of biology and chemistry. If we accept the prevalent reports of UFOs during these events as true — along with the antigravitational characteristics of the craft as an explanation for the lack of evidence sourcing these attacks — it would make sense to attribute all of these cases to a more technologically developed non-human intelligence.
I personally believe it is probable that is the case, and in this article, I am not arguing against a non-human origin as the motivations to conduct genetic experiments on our species are clear and easily understandable. But with Kelleher's bidirectional mimicry hypothesis, the door is left open for a human cause that may also help solve the entire mystery we face.
Another prevalent argument against the military conducting these studies is, once again, the motivation behind it. Those resistant to this idea insist that government agencies — or private corporation, for that matter — could simply buy their own cattle for experimentation without having to resort to more expensive clandestine means. While this solution may seem reasonable on its face and may very well be the reality, there are other considerations to make before dismissing the need for the covert, random sampling of the bovine supply chain by both the government and private industry.
Not Quite a Virus
During his time at NIDS, Dr. Kelleher wrote a paper that correlated data from cattle mutilation cases and the rise of prion disease over time and geographical areas. Titled Unexplained Cattle Deaths and the Emergence of a Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy (TSE) Epidemic in North America, the report is an unnerving look at this phenomenon and a preview of the non-fiction book Brain Trust that he would publish just a year later.
Written in June 2003, the same year "Mad Cow Disease" first officially appeared inside US borders, the paper describes an expanding silent epidemic of a cross-species prion disease known as Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy, or TSE. He also details specific cases of cattle mutilations that include graphic post-mortem images of the animals, along with the frequent appearance of black unmarked helicopters as reported by witnesses.
TSE manifests as different diseases depending on the animal it infects. However, one may infer that these are just semantics being played as it all boils down to the same mechanism of prions as the cause of them all. But I want to be as specific as possible due to the level of nuance required with these diagnoses and believe it's worth itemizing them briefly as listed in Dr. Kelleher's paper.
TSE — transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, a general term for infection in humans and all animals
CWD — chronic wasting disease, refers to specific TSE in deer and elk.
BSE — bovine spongiform encephalopathy, refers to specific TSE in cattle, also known as mad cow disease
Scrapie — specific TSE in sheep
Kuru — specific TSE in humans (overlaps with CJD)
CJD - Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, also a human TSE
Now that we've got that down, let's get straight to the point and take in Dr. Kelleher's general thesis from the introduction.
The two central and unanswered questions that have dogged research into this phenomenon are (a) Who and (b) Why? The purpose of the present paper is to focus on the second question and to review evidence suggesting a link between the intense animal mutilation waves of the 1970s/1980s and the emergence of an epidemic of infectious disease in North America during and after this period.
The issue of the contamination of the North American food supply by an infectious prion agent has come into sharper focus since the announcement in May 2003 by Canadian authorities of a confirmed case of mad cow disease in Alberta, Canada. This paper hypothesizes that patterns of animal mutilations are consistent with a covert infectious disease monitoring operation in the United States and elsewhere. It is not the purpose of this paper to ask the question: “who is killing and mutilating the animals”?
I find Dr. Kelleher's emphasis in the last sentence curious but reasonable, as making formal accusations about such an egregious breach of public trust in a scientific paper is unlikely the best way to reveal such a shock to the public. We will touch more on that later on.
It is clear from the outset that Dr. Kelleher's core focus in this research is to alert policymakers and the public about such a disastrous health emergency that has gone under the radar for decades. He outlines the history of TSE and its entry into the US wildlife population, explaining how and why it originated among a cannibalistic tribe in Papua New Guinea.
Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) describes a broad class of neurological diseases that until recently, had been rare and even obscure. D. Carleton Gajdusek’s brilliant investigation of kuru, a mysterious and fatal neurological disease that afflicted over 2000 members of the Fore tribe in New Guinea, together with his discovery of characteristic striking similarities in brain histopathology between kuru and an obscure human disease known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), earned him the Nobel prize in 1976.
…biochemical work by Prusiner in the 1980s suggested that TSEs were caused by the aberrant folding of a protein, known as a prion. Prusiner received a Nobel prize in 1997 for his work, although there is still considerable controversy regarding the causative agent of TSEs. In the 1980s, an outbreak of BSE, known as “mad cow disease”, in Great Britain was linked to the practice of feeding rendered cow-parts and other rendered animals back to cows, a process that was later dubbed “high-tech cannibalism” by the media.
Slaughterhouse waste was the cheapest option to provide cattle with the high-protein diets required to survive the effects of Monsanto's newly approved recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) approved by the FDA in 1993. A Canadian government report on the disease even stated that "BSE is thought to have arisen from cattle fed with a high-protein diet, obtained from remnants of butchered animals and [rBGH] developed in the early 1980s. This practice allows the accumulation of prions over many generations, and is now disallowed by modern cattle farming practices."
Essentially, humans were eating the cows with prions that were eating the cows with prions. The bovine growth hormones required them to eat even more protein, allowing multiple generations of prion to develop much faster. According to Dr, Kelleher's NIDS paper, the resulting CJD cases have been misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's.
Now we are left with the question that Dr. Kelleher did everything he could to avoid asking.
Who is killing and mutilating the animals?
A Leaky Laboratory
Dr. Kelleher's explanation regarding the original human version of prion disease, referred to earlier as kuru, demonstrates a potential motivator for factions in the government who may have been responsible for the transfer of the infectious agent into the US wildlife population and, ultimately, America's food supply chain.
He explains the origin of its detection, illustrating how a scientist studying the Fore tribe on the island of New Guinea was sending back kuru-infected brains.
The full title of contract DA-49-007-MD-77 that funded Gajdusek’s travels was: “Field Studies on the Control of Infectious Disease of Military Importance.” Beginning in 1958, Dr Joe Smadel had moved from the United States Army Walter Reed Hospital to the nearby National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus, had set up a sophisticated lab with extensive neuropathology facilities and staff and had begun to receive a steady stream of autopsied kuru brains from the wilds of New Guinea, all sent by Carleton Gajdusek.
Although the origin of kuru is presently unknown, Gajdusek’s frequent written correspondence with Smadel mentions the acceleration in kuru infection that apparently occurred in the 1940s, although there is evidence from interview testimony with elderly Fore tribes people that the first kuru cases were remembered in the 1920s.
The Fore were notoriously vague about time, so attempts to specifically delineate the time when kuru emerged as a full blown epidemic in New Guinea are fraught with error, although Gajdusek appears to estimate the largest leap in the epidemic numbers occurring sometime in the 1940s. Nevertheless, it can be unequivocally stated that the importation of dozens of kuru brains and their storage at Fort Detrick, Maryland together with subsequent infectious testing in multiple species at NIH during the 1960s, represented a huge introduction and spread of infectious TSE’s into the United States.
Primates (Chimps, Gibbons, Old World monkeys, New World monkeys), guinea pigs, mink, goats, sheep, mice etc were injected with human kuru brain extracts. It is intriguing that the first documented case of CWD appeared in 1967 at a Colorado State University wildlife research facility in Fort Collins, Colorado, within a few years of this intensive cross species kuru testing that originated from experimental facilities at Fort Detrick and Bethesda.
If groups within the US government greatly escalated the prion epidemic through experimentations with the brains of cannibals, that would be quite a black eye on those departments and erode trust in institutions. A more clandestine approach to monitoring the wildlife population would better insulate against any public outcry or academic condemnation.
Known in the UFO sphere for its multitude of biological warfare tests spearheaded by Nazis through Operation Paperclip after World War II, it wouldn't be surprising if such compartmentalized programs at Fort Detrick, along with their contractors, tried to squirrel away any information about reckless experiments that triggered an epidemic in the food chain.
A successor to MKULTRA, called MKNAOMI, was a biological warfare research collaboration between the CIA and the Army at Fort Detrick. Although little unclassified information about the program exists, a document from the JFK Assassination records shows the CIA began working on biological weapons research with the Special Operations Division of Fort Detrick in 1952. The document states that "from its outset, the project was characterized by a compartmentation that was extreme even by CIA standards."
Even more telling was what the document says about what was found at the lab.
By the late 1960's, a stockpile of some 51 to 20 different biological warfare agents and toxins was maintained on a regular basis by SOD for possible Agency use. The supply included such agents as food poisons, infectious viruses, lethal botulinum toxin, paralytic shellfish toxin, snake (krait) venom, Microsporeum gypseum which produces severe skin disease, etc. Varying amounts of these materials ranging from 100 grams to 100 milligrams were maintained.
As noted above, with the Presidential Order requiring the destruction of Army biological warfare and toxin stockpiles, the question was raised as to the disposition of Agency materials. Though specific accounting for each agent on the list is not on hand, DOD indicates that, with the likely exception of the shellfish toxin, all of these materials were in fact destroyed by SOD personnel.
Furthermore, it may be helpful to recall the somewhat general consensus that the legacy UFO program was transferred to private industry to avoid scrutiny in the late 1960s and 1970s as relayed by attorney Danny Sheehan and journalist Ross Coulthart. It’s fair to question whether or not certain biological warfare programs did the same.
I think it is safe to speculate that some of the noted "infectious viruses" were likely prions. Whether or not they were manipulated in certain ways may never be known, as the CIA document makes clear that nearly every record about this program was destroyed.
I think the argument is pretty strong for attributing the human side of the cattle mutilation phenomenon to a covert disease monitoring program run by those in the shadows who are wary of leaving any evidence behind.
Luckily for them, they can always blame the aliens.
More to the Story
There is much more additional data on this story that I will follow up on at some point, but the aspects are very disturbing. Recent scientific studies have begun to link prion disease to Alzheimer’s through an epigenetic mechanism, indicating that Dr. Kelleher has been right for two decades and nobody paid attention.
There are also larger connections when it comes to private industry and potential motivations to conduct cattle mutilations that may actually be a bridge too far for the moment.
I will hint that this very litigious entity technically does not exist as of 2019 due to a merger. The company has deep ties to the Manhattan Project as well as Operation Paperclip through its dealings with a consortium that enabled the rise of Adolf Hitler.
The mindset necessary to conduct these kinds of brutal experiments with no regard for the welfare of any lifeform involved only drives the evidence home. Add in the company’s longtime stranglehold over the agriculture sector, their bullying of farmers through lawsuits, and the fact that they were responsible for the invention of the original bovine growth hormone, and you might see where this narrative is headed.
I will leave it there for now as this information is a lot to take in, and frankly rather exhausting to try to convey in an understandable format. But the one thing I’m certain of is that there is a scandal regarding prion disease on the horizon. Fingers will be pointed and political games will be played, but recent scientific studies appear to be signaling a reckoning.
I hope people remember that Dr. Kelleher wrote a book about this twenty years ago, and only now will people start paying attention as it starts to affect them personally.
It’s only human nature.
I’m an American who lived in the UK for a few years in the late 1980’s. This has resulted in me being barred from giving blood at the Red Cross or during blood drives. I was told that it is not known how long prions can live in a person before manifesting as CJD or perhaps now Alzheimer’s. As I enter my mid-60s, I may be finding out soon.
A bit of an off topic: does the substack subscription include the discord invite?