FBI file: Animal Mutilation, Animal Mutilation Part 02

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

THE MUTILATION MYS.ORY He said that the cult members halked about human sacrifice as the next step, but he had thought they were just engaging in satanic ave and hyperbole.

(Continued from page 52) was taken from Marion to the Dakota County Jail, in Hastings, Minnesota, by U.S. Marshals. On February 18th, agent Flickinger conducted his first interrogation; with him, as observers, were Jerome Clark and a former Army paratroop commando named Brad Ayers, active with the Center for UFO Studies.

While claiming not to have been a member of the mutilation mob himself, Bankston alleged during the interview that he had been in correspondence with diverse members of the mob around the country. He said that he had originally heard about the group from other inmates and had recorded his conversations in a notebook crammed with prison-cell gossip. He then outlined a scenario that shed light on many puzzling aspects of the mutilations.

Bankston asserted that the group used a powerful animal tranquilizer called PCP to calm the cattle. They next held amyl nitrite to an animal's nose to cause its heart to beat rapidly, then withdrew blood via a large veterinarian syringe. There were no footprints because the men walked on pieces of cardboard; in snow, they used blowtorches to melt the tracks around the animals. One reason for ering evidence, Bankston claimed, was so that the multitations would appear to be the work of extraterrestrials.

Bankston stated that at Leavenworth Penitentiary around 1969, he had met the treasurer of a chapter of a lamps motorcycle gang and that this biker talked about earlier cattle mutilations. The biker also described his experiences in the Air Force, where he had driven a general around to inspect various missile silos, including some, in Alaska. He told Bankston of an idea to seize a missile at one of the isolated sites; assuming that the missile was armed with a nuclear warhead, the bikers would then have the ultimate ransom or terror device. In 1975, oddly enough, strange flying objects did hover above Minuteman missile silos in Montana, near which there were also numerous animal mutilations; according to law-enforcement officials in the area, Malmstrom Air Force Base scrambled jet fighters to intercept the flying objects—unsuccessfully.

On March 16th, after interviewing Bankston for a month, Federal officials transferred Dan Dugan to the Dakota County Jail from the Texas prison, in which he was serving a term for crimes related to auto theft. Dugan, though kept apart from Bankston, confirmed virtually everything in Bankston's scenario.

The organization the informants described was all-Caucasian; it was extremely anti-black and anti-Mexican. Its adherents, in fact, could be called Satannecks. And what was the name of this organization? In his letters—and I have seen some 15 of them—Bankston refers to the militators simply as the Occult; to Flickinger, however, both Bankston and Dugan named a well-known national organization devoted to the worship of Satan.

Dugan claimed to have been recruited by the cult in Fort Worth, Texas, around 1965. He was into drugs at the time, he said, and the Devil worshipers offered him bodies of dope; other members were into chopping up small animals and using their parts in ceremonies. The man who Dugan said recruited him also happened to be a helicopter pilot and a suspected smuggler and dope dealer. Authorities in Texas later placed him under surveillance to see if he was piloting any whirlybird sallies of Satan.

Bankston and Dugan supplied a list of mutilation-mob members and many of them were found by authorities to have a background in occult practices and criminality. One woman on the list, for instance, had been arrested in 1969 for robbing graves in North Dakota. (Another allegation would, if proved, have meant that there was a Satanist mutilator with her own network TV series.) One factor that seemed to give Dugan credibility; according to a well-informed source privy to the investigation, was his obvious great fear of the Satanist society.

Dugan told agent Flickinger that he began to drift away from the Satandts when he was actually exposed to huma-sac. He said that the cult members had talked about human sacrifice as the next step, but he had thought they were just engaging in satanic jive and hyperbole. But in 1965, Dugan claimed, he and eight other members were camped on a lake near Cozad, Nebraska, preparing for a ceremony. The group had been using PCP to tranquilize animals and now decided to try the drug out on four young campers from Kansas City. Mutilation-mob members with tranquilizer rifles then shot the four youngsters, who died two hours later, apparently from PCP overdose. Since the campers were already dead, the group decided to try out its ceremonies on the deceased, and withdrew blood and worked satanic cruelties. Afterward, Dugan claimed, the bodies were cut up and placed in burlap bags. Dugan said that he did not see what happened next, but he suspected that the bodies were interred in a nearby gravel pit.

Authorities In Cozad were informed of Dugan's story and as soon as the snows melted (it was March), police spent many long hours looking for the bodies but no skeletons were found.

During interrogation, Bankston repeated his allegation that the mutilators were involved somehow in the 1970 bombing at the University of Wisconsin. This time he named a man whom he had met in Leavenworth Penitentiary as having supplied the explosives used by the bombers. This same explosives expert, Bankston continued, was involved in a theft of plutonium in Oklahoma in late 1974. Bankston also accused an attorney in Oklahoma of having entered the store plutonium in her basement. What horrifying was the possibility that the plutonium theft was connected to the case of Karen Silkwood. Silkwood died under mysterious circumstances in November 1974, while investigating apparent improprieties at a plutonium-pack plant, Kerr-McGee's Cimarron Facility in Crescent, Oklahoma.

Plutonium is extremely carcinogenic and is one of the deadliest of poison only 4.4 pounds of it are needed to make an atomic bomb powerful enough to put the downtown of a city. When Silkwood died in an automobile accident, he had with her a file of investigative cases turned over to David Burnham of The New York Times. The day after her death when friends searched her wrecked file was missing. Bankston's claim raised the possibility that Silkwood inadvertently came across the murder mob as it ripped off plutonium for use as a domestic terror weapon.

When Federal officials checked the attorney accused by Bankston of stealing plutonium, it was discovered that she was already suspected by home authorities of having come with a prominent member of the Maha.

All in all, the Bankston-Dugan ser was the ultimate tale of terror. everything: kidnapped missile silot tions in the name of Satan, pla terror, quarries with buried victims even the ominous possibility of Stockbroken and pore-happy milit among the mute mob's 400 mem Because some of what the in were saying agreed with know Flickinger was relieved of his ATF duties and assigned full time mobilations case, under the super United States Attorney Robert F. Minneapolis.

What actually went on d. Feder (Continued on page