FBI file: Animal Mutilation, Animal Mutilation Part 02

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

THE MUTILATION MYSTERY Most terrifying of all, Bankston claimed that the animal mutilations are but a prelude to what we hall here call hum-sac, or human sacrifice.

caused by disease. The copter-cruising-utanist hypothesis was so compelling, however, that no one was yet ready to entertain the theory that the bull had been injected with Clostridia bacteria or toxin-perhaps for experimental purposes. For indeed, how difficult it would have been for a bunch of airborne turkeys to locate a cold, dead animal in the dark! And post-death muties would have had to be ready for weird smells also, as the fumes from a rotting cow causes one to seriously consider puking as a high-priority activity.

## THE UFO ANGLE

The incident that ultimately brought the UFO-sleuth nexus into the mute picture occurred in mid-December 1974, when a cow was found chopped up at the farm of Frank Schifelbien, near Kimball, Minnesota. At the same time, there were a number of UFO sightings in the state. After a rather cursory examination of the mutilation site, a Minnesota flying-saucer buff (and avowed Sasquatch contactee) named Terry Mitchell came to the conclusion that hovering aliens had beamed a high-energy ray at the cow. There were also suspiciously broken branches, undoubtedly caused, so Mitchell's theory went, by beedless saucerite aeronautics; and then there were strange indentations in the ice on the farmer's pond—obviously gouged by UFO landing gear—and peculiar circles in the snow, which appeared in an aerial photo.

Mitchell went on to postulate that UFOlk like steak as much as most Americans—although, again, the parts of the animal taken were those seldom found in any but a weirdo's casterole. Nevertheless, Mitchell's theory created a media flap that culminated in a telephone interview on Tom Snyder's NBC Tomorrow show in late 1974.

it was at this point that serious saucer students decided to get into the case. Dr. J. Allen Hynek, director of the prestigious Center for UFO Studies and professor of astronomy at Northwestern University, had a friend in Minneapolis who had done some field-investigation work for the center in his leisure time. This man was Donald E. Flickinger, a special agent for the Treasury Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and in January 1975, Dr. Hynek asked him to investigate the Minnesota murifications.

Flickinger traveled to Kimball, interviewed Frank Schifelbien and rapidly demolished the UFO hypothesis. The

saucer-landing divots in the pond turned

out to be watering holes chopped in the ice; the tree branches had been broken by

the wind and by Schifelbien himself; the saucer circles were actually sunw-covered silage piles.

Word spread quickly among UFO researchers across the United States that the highly respected Dr. Hynek had taken an interest in the mutilations. One of those who heard the news was Jerome Clark, a UFO researcher of some reknown, who had been investigating the cattle mutilations since they first occurred in his home state of Minnesota in the spring of 1973. Clark wrote to agent Flickinger in January 1975 and related the allegations of a convict named A. Kenneth Bankston.

## ENTER SATAN

During his many months of investigation, Clark had talked with Ross Doyen, a Kansas state senator who, in late 1973, had found a 500-pound heifer dead on his farm, with a six-inch hole carved in its belly. When a report of the incident was carried in Kansas newspapers, Doyen told Clark, he was contacted by Bankston, who at the time was serving a sentence for bank robbery at the Leavenworth (Kansas) Federal Penitentiary. Bankston wrote to Doyen that the mutilations were the work of a clandestine society of Satan, which had decided to expand his public viciousness.

Deyen did not place much credibility in Bankston's story, but this did not deter Clark from calling the warden at Leavenworth and obtaining permission to correspond with the inmate. There followed an exchange of letters in which Bankston's first missive—dated January 23, 1974—told Clark that "this cult is of Satan," that its members scarfed the animals' blood with hypodermic needles and that the animals' sex organs are taken for fertility rites." Bankston alleged in subsequent letters that the same cult was also involved in some way with the bombing of the Army math lab at the University of Wisconsin in August 1970, a grim deed that left a university researcher dead. Most terrifying of all, Bankston claimed that the animal mutifications are but a prelude to what we shall here call hum-sac, or human sacrifice.

Bankston was quick to tell Clark that he wanted to help authorities round up the cultists, but he was afraid of reprisals within the prison system. He asked that Clark intervene to have him and some other possible informants removed to a jail in Minnesota where they could talk more freely.

Clark could not help Bankston and had allowed his correspondence with him to lapse by the time he contacted Flickinger in early 1975. When Flickinger met with Clark shortly thereafter and heard

more details of the cult of Satan, the seeds of a large and mysterious Federal investigation were brought to shoot over the next few months, the cattle tilations spread like a psychotic epidemic into 22 Western states.

## THE BANKSTON SCENARIO

At Flickinger's urging, Clark wrote again to Bankston, who had been transferred to Marion Federal Penitentiary in Illinois. Bankston replied with several letters, and the horrifying allegations continued to flow. In a letter of January 11. 1975, for instance, Bankston averred that bull sex organs had been embedded in the bodies of a young runaway elephant murdered somewhere in the Mid- at Bankston also continued to ask that he be transferred to a Minnesota prison, where he would be safe from inmate reprisal.

Flickinger contacted the United State District Attorney's office in Minnesota, and the U.S. Attorney approves Federal Judge Myles Lord, a respee Minnesota liberal jurist. Judge Lord contacted the warden at Marion Peninert to explore the possibilities of a transfer.

When he learned of Judge Lord's terest, however, Bankston wrote to C and expressed sore fear in the prospect being removed to a Minneapolis jail said that he feared a group of oriented bikers who were heavily involved in the mutilations and some of whom believed, had contacts within law enforcement circles. The group was located Minneapolis area, and if they should hip to the snitching, they might harm What he wanted, Bankston said, was small county jail, out of the way.

Bankston also urged that the ties bring to Minnesota for question former Leavenworth inmate-friend named Dan Dugan. Dugan, who was serving time at LaTuna Corrective institution in Texas, had actually, soston's claim went, been a member the satanic society and had part in its rituals—including the dread hum-tac.

It appears that the most com reason for Judge Lord to issue an to bring Bankston (and later Dug Minnesota was the former's ally at one time taken very seriously by enforcement officials, that there list of prominent Americans—most them political liberals—who were killed by the mutilators. Minnesota actor Hubert Humphrey, a close from Lord's, was on the alleged list, as the names of newscasters, members Congress and even movie actress Novak. Accordingly, on February 1975, Bankston. (Continued on